True Ruler
by Izumi1909
Summary: [AU] The Royalty of Scandi Kingdom has always been the puppet of its own Council. Three years ago, a fire in its palace killed many, including Prince Emil and his parents. Driven to exile by a Council member's actions, Emil's younger cousin and his former betrothed befriend some of Emil's former servants and soon join the few knowing a secret that may change everything.
1. The tea and dye seller – Part 1

**Note:** First, I'd like to warn that there's implied sexual abuse (including of minors) in that story, so it may not be for you if those things make you uncomfortable. This is the same AU as the "True Ruler" one-shot in my prompt fic collection, but written so it can work as a mostly self-contained first chapter. Otherwise, these two chapters are technically a longer chapter split in two. The initial ~6000-word draft ended up having a small cliffhanger followed by an infodump mid-way through, so I just went ahead and made it two ~3000-word chapters.

 **The tea and dye seller – Part 1**

-So… what kind of person was your betrothed?  
Helena had drunk a little too much to have any respect for the saying according to which one shouldn't speak ill of the dead.  
-I think Sune and his siblings liked him much better than I did. And all three of them were only about ten when he died. Just about everyone older than that agreed that he was basically an older, fatter and dumber version of Sune and his brother. I know he was the worst thing I could imagine having in my bed at the time. How wrong I was about that…  
Helena's drinking partner knew better than to prod her about that particular subject when she briefly vented about it. Even though she doubted the existence of his husband who was allegedly a crowd-hating night owl, Stig got credit for believing the real story. Half the people in her new home country, and probably this very tavern, believed "How wrong she had been" and his actions to be a complete fabrication on her part intended to escape the consequences of her own wrongdoings. The half that did believe she was telling the truth to an extent tended to be all too aware of the potential consequences of defending an alleged outlaw in public or not understand that the _actual_ situation meant that nobody was touching a single hair of Sune's on her watch. Stig himself asked after Sune quite often, but almost exclusively on the matter of his recovery from the situation that had made Helena leave Scandi Kingdom with Sune in tow. Helena _really_ , _really_ hoped Stig wasn't going to turn out to be in the middle of gaining her trust for the purpose of betraying her in some way at a later time. In addition to how similarly true and false friends could act early on, the fact that nobody in the island-district had known Stig for more than three years unfortunately made that possibility very real. Stig also refused to sell any kind of hair dye without testing it on himself first; this resulted in his hair, beard and even eyebrows getting a new color every few weeks, and Helena having no idea what they looked like undyed after close to half a year of knowing him. Even more unfortunately, she was just that desperate for a friend outside of her cousin's household; the whole nightmare that had ruined her reputation back in Scandi had also stacked so many layers of complexity onto her relationship with Sune that a lot of their recovery involved making their lives as separate as they could reasonably be. Stig stared at the bottom of his mug, returning to their actual conversation subject:  
-Sigrun and Mikkel claimed that he wasn't all bad also. I was hoping you would be among the people who had experienced some little-known good side of him first-hand.  
Helena sighed:  
-Well, to give him _a little_ credit, I was unaware of many of the ways it was possible to hurt someone at the time. By the standards I have today, he gets points for not having ever deliberately hurt people to anyone's knowledge. But the guy was still getting the whole spoiled Prince treatment, so he has quite a history of _inadvertently_ hurting people. And who knows how he would have ended up treating his "birthday gift" if there hadn't been that damn fire.  
The heirs to the throne of Scandi Kingdom traditionally got a new servant with a very specific duty on their sixteenth birthday. Since their marriage tended to be a strictly political alliance that required a pair theoretically able to produce a child, that new servant was frequently a way of officially integrating an already existing lover into the household or giving those who preferred their own sex a socially acceptable partner. The latter, but not the former, had applied to Emil. Due to the nature of the "present", heirs turning sixteen tended to be among those leaving their own birthday party as soon as it was no longer rude to do so that year. That had made Helena much less eager to be on the guest list than previous years. Her schedule had conveniently managed to change in such a way that she had actually had something more important going on, a couple of days of travel away from the Scandi royal palace, when a fire had started in the archives while the "guests-only" portion of the party had been just getting started. That had been, without her being aware of it at the time, Helena's first brush with the extent to which Scandi's True Rulers, better known as the Kingdom's Royal Council, could manipulate events to serve their interests. That had been three years ago. She could still hear "How wrong she had been" boasting about how he had earned his position in the "Council" by being the one behind the fire.

The tavern's door, which was near Helena and Stig's table, was slammed open. Sigrun stepped in, dropped a few coins on the table, and literally dragged Helena out of the tavern, onto the street leading to her cousin's estate:  
-Sorry, but I hope you're not too drunk to take a patient. One of the guests was dumb enough to try "testing" on Sune and Alva. Sune recognized the "love pill", but Alva swallowed it whole before he could stop her.  
Helena's body's reaction to Sigrun's words was almost enough to compensate for the effect of a couple drinks on her thought process:  
-No…  
Both giving "love pills" to someone under sixteen and tricking someone into having one were illegal, for a very good reason. Some speculated that many couples that had married for other reasons than love would be childless if it weren't for them. Children weren't supposed to have even seen one of those pills, unless they had extremely careless parents who didn't hide them properly. They could also have seen them for the same reason Sune had, which was far from enviable. While Helena understood how someone could be curious of the effects of those pills on children, she really wondered what went through the mind of those who got to the level of curiosity-satisfying that required actually having at least one child on hand; the mere fact that "testing" had emerged as a euphemism for doing such a thing sickened Helena.  
-Who…  
-Hulda, the sweet seller. She tried to pass the pills off as a hard to find kind of candy.  
The very jobs that had made Adam and Ylva able to take Helena and Sune in meant that there was almost always at least one guest less permanent than themselves in the house on a given day. Adam and Ylva had at least been honest when they had told Helena that they could only really vouch for the other members of the family living in the house and their most long-term employees. The fact that their ten-year-old youngest daughter had been too young to be told anything more than "someone was very mean to Sune, please be nice to him" had turned out to be a lot of help in terms of giving Sune someone with whom he could more or less just be a kid again. As soon as they got inside the house, Sigrun made a beeline for Alva's bedroom, in front of which Adam, Ylva, Tyra and Johan were waiting. Both Adam and Ylva nodded when they saw Helena arrive, signaling that they trusted her to help Alva.

There was no widely known product or spell that countered the effects of "love pills". If someone forced or tricked into ingesting one was lucky enough to be able to escape the situation before its effects truly kicked in, all that could be done was find them a room with a bed in which they could be alone for a few hours. Nobody else could be the room with them, as those under the pill's influence made extremely drunk people look selective with those to whom they showed affection in all meanings of the term. But that was what to do if they were an adult. When it came to children, the fact that the pills were meant for fully grown people alone could be a threat to their life, which required someone with medical expertise to watch over them until the effects wore off. This was the reason Helena wasn't surprised to find Mikkel at Alva's bedside. There was otherwise no agreed-upon way to deal with the young girl's current state, thanks to the reluctance of some of those with the power to make such decisions to even discuss the subject. Mikkel had apparently gone with giving Alva something to hug and making her help her own body eliminate the drug via moving it a little, judging by the large pillow in which her face was buried and the fact that she was lying on her side, back to the door, frantically kicking the air. Helena took her medical check-up talisman out of her pocket and put it on the top of Alva's back, which was exposed due to her having been stripped down to her underwear to handle her own increased body temperature a little better. Aside from the differences that came from Alva being a girl, Helena recognized everything from the very first time one of those pills had been forced onto Sune, including the fact that her body's fight against the pill's less desirable effects was a desperate one. Treating her wasn't going to be as hard as Helena had feared, but she was going to need to concentrate while she was drawing the spell on one of the blank talismans she always carried. She finished, let the ink dry, and tied it around Alva's neck. Alva promptly settled down and released her grip on the pillow. Helena helped her roll over to her other side and delicately took the pillow out of her arms so they could see each other's faces:  
-Helena?  
Exhaustion had already set into Alva's face, but she didn't make any move towards Helena. The spell had worked.  
-Please keep this necklace on until tomorrow morning. It's okay to go to sleep if you feel like doing it now.  
Helena looked in Mikkel's direction, and could tell he was astonished despite how little he showed it. As a non-magical healer born and raised in Scandi's Southern Region, the idea that magic-based healing was unreliable was buried too deep into his skull to be easily eliminated. He wasn't that bad a person, other than that. Helena let her thoughts drift into the circumstances in which she had elaborated the spell she had just used. "How wrong she had been" had wanted to elaborate a talisman-compatible spell that shared some of the properties of the "love pill". In his tunnel vision, he had forgotten how easy it was to figure out a counter once the spell itself was created. Unfortunately, the price of Helena and Sune's escape had been high. The entire Kingdom of Scandi now genuinely believed that the "love spell" was all her doing, rather than a project on which she had been forced to cooperate under three different means of pressure. According to a rumor that had somehow taken hold faster than she and Sune had been able to leave Scandi, Helena went around pretending to know a spell that could counter the effects of the "love pill", hoping that some shelter or clinic would take the bait and obliviously become her own, personal brothel. Depending on who one asked, Sune could be anything from her willing accomplice to being in the very situation in which _both_ of them had been in regards to Scandi's newest True Ruler.

Helena left the room and promptly told Tyra she could check her work. Alva's older sister was one of the very people who had been fooled by the false information concerning Helena, yet could greatly benefit from believing her. If an island-district of Saimaa was big enough to have a "Scandi neighborhood", it was usually big enough to have some kind of abused spouse shelter; Tyra helped out in the local one. She knew a little medical magic, but it was focused entirely on fixing things from which Alva had been fortunately spared this evening. As Tyra rushed into the room, Johan, Alva's older brother and the family's middle child, disdainfully told Helena that if she was looking for Sune, he was in their shared room and not allowed to leave it without supervision. From what Helena could tell, the reason of Johan's baseline of mild hostility towards both her and Sune was split between getting part of his big brother role taken away from him and getting some of his expectations about "love pills" crushed less than a year before becoming old enough to use them. Helena and Sune earned the existence of some of their meager savings to the latter fact; Adam and Ylva considered that they would have probably had to spend much more money in the future if Johan had reached the age of sixteen without understanding some of the things Helena and Sune's presence had taught him.

Helena found Sune curled up in the bed's blankets, having not gone beyond kicking his boots off and leaving his knife belt on the floor in terms of undressing. She sat on the bed, and he promptly crawled over to rest his head on her lap, leaving his right ear exposed to surrounding sounds. That meant he was alright talking. His version of the story was much more detailed than Sigrun's, and included the fact that Hulda had been sent to spend the night somewhere outside the house. Sune quickly admitted to wishing the two of them had somewhere else they could sleep as well. The first adult he had found after dragging Alva out of Hulda's room had been a new servant who had no idea Sune actually knew what "love pills" looked like, and had not seen it worth "bothering Mikkel over a piece of candy". When Alva had started cuddling Sune and giving him kisses on the cheek, the servant had simply found it adorable and admitted to suspecting the young girl had a child's crush on Sune. Fortunately, the whole incident had also made Sune late for his swordplay lessons and Sigrun had not only gone looking for him, but enlisted Mikkel's help in doing so. Unsurprisingly, Sune was angry at that servant for her obliviousness, but didn't think that was enough to ask Adam and Ylva to terminate her over. She remained someone Sune didn't want to run into anytime soon, along with Alva. Another reason for which the two of them spending the following night outside the house would be preferable was that while the "impulse to show affection" phase of the pill's effects was going to end by the next morning, the "wanting to be around the other person, regardless of how they treat you" phase was going to last a good three days. Helena's counter-spell didn't work on that phase, but it could be shortened by making sure the people involved didn't see each other at all for the entire first day and first night. Unfortunately, Alva knew exactly where to look for Sune the second he was in the house at all, and was at an age at which quite a lot of things forbidden by adults and older children looked extremely arbitrary. Strictly speaking, Helena and Sune's liberty of movement within the Scandi neighborhood could let them sleep in the nearby Inn, but neither she nor Sune liked the idea of sleeping in the same building as a bunch of complete strangers. Not to mention that the innkeeper would want to know the reason of their stay, and Helena didn't want to be responsible for too many people finding out what had happened in Adam and Ylva's household too soon. The reason many of the neighborhood's residents didn't want her anywhere near their children was to consider on top of everything else. She suggested that the two of them take a walk around the neighborhood and see how Sune felt after it. Sune agreed it was worth a try.

The neighborhood's single, but meandrous street was starting to empty itself, as those who lived outside it, or on the nearby smaller islands, were starting to leave. As they were walking by the harbor, Helena saw a familiar head of currently-red hair waiting for the crowd to thin before he could get to his boat:  
-Stig! You're still here?  
Five minutes later, Helena was very grateful for the magic heating plate Stig had acquired at some point, the cups and water he used to let people sample the tea he sold alongside the hair dye, and whoever had been dumb enough to _not_ buy that delicious blueberry blend.  
-Your tea usually tastes like you are trying to repurpose a failed hair dye. Since when do you carry something so good?  
Stig took on his usual look of being slightly more offended than the situation warranted, even when he knew he was being teased:  
-People around here actually like the "failed hair dyes" for some reason, and I kind of need the money. That one is a blend my cousin-in-law's wife came up with, and I think I'm the only one besides her who likes it. I mostly keep it in stock on the off-chance a third person who likes it comes along.  
Helena took another sip:  
-I think I may be interested in a pot, next time. This tastes strangely like the kind of tea I grew up with.  
Sune seemed to like it as well, considering the sound of appreciation he had after drinking it was the first he had emitted since they had left the house. The improvised tea party unfortunately had to be cut short, as Stig needed to get back to his island. He slapped he forehead little after getting up from his seat:  
-Hey, I just realized I know of a place the two of you can stay tonight. How willing would Lady Ylva be to let the two of you leave the island for the night?


	2. The tea and dye seller – Part 2

**The tea and dye seller – Part 2**

According to what Stig had told her during one of their early conversations, his parents had been hired to work in the Scandi royal palace sometime after Helena's last visit there, and told him to leave the country if they ever died under suspicious circumstances, even accidentally. While they always accounted for anyone close to their intended victims, the True Rulers varied greatly in how they treated the blood relatives of their accidental victims. They ranged from obsessively cleaning up "loose ends" to considering that doing just that was the worst approach possible. Even "loose ends" who were initially left alone still ran the risk of being considered more disposable than other people when the variable part of a True Ruler's plan included the exact identity of the person or small number of people suffering from it. Because the True Rulers had significantly more limited means of action outside of Scandi, fleeing to another country, then keeping a low profile once there, had turned into the only reliable way to tell the True Rulers "I have no intention of retaliating, so please leave me alone". Servants directly serving a Scandi Royal were placed in a group of three people, in which all three were to be punished if one member harmed someone among the Royals or the True Rulers in any way. This resulted in members of the same trio having to trust each other enough to tell each other everything, and anything happening to one member being a sign that the two others were in danger of being next.

Having grown aware of this situation over the last three years had made Helena legitimately surprised to run into a couple familiar faces on Stig's home island: the two trio-mates of Emil's scribe Tuuri, who had also been her younger cousin and lover respectively. Tuuri herself had unfortunately died in the palace fire, her body most likely one of the many unidentified victims alongside Stig's parents. Both of them being mages had enabled Lalli and Reynir to know Tuuri had been lost without actually witnessing her death and prompted them to leave the palace while it was still burning. They had run into each other, then into Stig, in their effort to do so. Reynir had led the two others to the house in which Mikkel lived at the time, while Sigrun was visiting him. The two older adults had liked the idea of the three young men travelling on their own to Finmi so little that they had decided accompany them, eventually getting hired in Adam and Ylva's household while the younger ones went to live in Lalli and Tuuri's family home. Though Reynir had been very diligent in explaining what had happened as he and Helena were peeling vegetables for the evening's dinner, several questions had popped into Helena's mind before he was even finished:  
-First of all, since when is Lalli a mage?  
Lalli had never been an official member of Emil's retinue. He had been present in the palace on the same basis a non-paired female servant's child would have been, due to being one of those people who had trouble navigating the world on their own even after reaching adulthood. Helena had always found the two cousins from Finmi to be a strange addition to Emil's retinue, as all his other servants had had some kind of talent that enabled them to act as an impromptu bodyguard to Emil, which also came in handy if they were personally attacked. Tuuri herself had told Helena that she had no magic or fighting ability whatsoever and Lalli… come to think of it, Helena had never considered asking about him. Like everyone else, she had simply gotten used to seeing him silently following Tuuri around, sometimes holding something for her, never making any move to interact with anyone who wasn't his cousin, and withdrawing from any interactions initiated by others. Reynir spelled out the actual situation just as Helena's mind was starting to consider its rough outlines:  
-The way he naturally acts makes him look less able to take care of himself than he actually is. He was supposed to protect Tuuri if anyone tried anything, but let everyone think he was harmless in the meantime. But not everything was an act. There are many things he won't notice or understand unless someone spells them out to him. Lying doesn't come to him easily, so he tends to assume people are telling him the truth unless he hears something that is obviously contradictory with something that was told to him earlier. So he tends to like having some people he can trust around to make him aware of the things that are going over his head.  
-So now I know why _Lalli_ is still here. What about you? I thought you had family back on that giant iceberg of yours.  
Reynir let out a resigned sigh:  
-Sigrun, Mikkel, Lalli, Stig and I found out a big secret. We're not sure whether any of the members of the Council are aware of it, or know we know it. It's something that won't hurt much as long as we stay here, and I don't want to burden my family with it. I informed them that I'm alive and need to stay with the others, but not much more than that.  
-And what about Stig?  
-The only extended family he's aware of having is in Scandi, so he doesn't exactly have another place to go that isn't in the very country we're trying to avoid for a while.  
Stig had mentioned those family members also during their many conversations. An uncle, an aunt and their children.  
-Is that secret anything you can tell me? It's not like I'm moving out of Adam and Ylva's house anytime soon after all.  
-We've actually been considering telling you, and maybe Sune, for a while. But I assume you can understand why you and Sune moving in so close by required us making sure there wasn't anything more to it, even though Lord Adam is your cousin. Stig needs to regularly go on the bigger island to set up his stall anyway, so it was easier to have him approach you.  
It took Helena's mind a few moments process what Reynir had just told her. Stig had been assessing her trustworthiness just as she had been assessing his. It was quite a piece of news, but not enough to put her guard down. After all, even Reynir and Lalli had only met Stig on the day of the palace fire. For all she knew, the two servants to whom Stig claimed to be related could have been completely childless, if they existed at all. Sune was helping Lalli with the meat in another section of the kitchen and things seemed to be going well so far.

Lalli had turned out to be able to speak some half-decent Scandi, which enabled Sune to ask him how, exactly, he was still alive. When they were ten, he, Håkan and Anna had heard from chatting servants that Emil was going to get a special present for his sixteenth birthday, and that it was in his room. Sune and his siblings had snuck onto the room's balcony to get a glimpse of it, but the only thing out of the ordinary they had seen had been Tuuri's weird cousin sitting on the bed, clad in nice sleepwear. They had left soon after for a reason Sune didn't quite remember. After the fire, Sune had assumed that Lalli was among the many dead. While Håkan and Anna were probably still wondering what Lalli had been doing in Emil's room that day, Sune now knew enough of how some adults occupied themselves to have done the math. This, alongside the fact that Lalli had turned out to be Stig's elusive husband, went a long way on explaining why Stig had asked after him so often, in Sune's mind. Unfortunately, Lalli's mere survival could be the very "red flag" Helena had been keeping her eyes peeled for ever since her first drink with Stig. Sune considered alerting Helena in some way, but decided he could try finding out more himself. He still felt bad for the fact that he could have kept Alva from swallowing that pill if he had paid better attention to the appearance of the "candy" Hulda had given both of them. Yet, he also couldn't believe he had managed to take Alva out of the room and quickly find another adult, even though the first one had been far from helpful. Within the flood of bad memories and emotions with which he had been overcome once Alva had been confirmed to be out of danger, there had been one that had felt surprisingly good, and a little thought during the past couple hours had led him to decide that it was what it felt like to be the one helping, rather than the one who was helped. He wanted to feel this again.  
-Did Emil get to his room before the fire?  
Lalli somehow suddenly looked more focused on his meticulous meat-preparing than before. An answer finally came, right as Sune was beginning to assume he wasn't going to get one:  
-No. I didn't see him before I had to leave to not die of the smoke. Are you one of the kids that climbed the… balcony?  
-Yes.  
-Where are the other two?  
Sune hadn't heard that question alluding to how inseparable he and his siblings had been during their childhood in three years. Come to think of it, that peek in Emil's room had been one of the very last things they had all done together.  
-My father is the King and my mother the Queen now that Emil and his parents are dead. Either my bother or my sister will have the throne next.  
-Okay.  
After that, Lalli seemed to have no interest in continuing the conversation. Sune tried to continue it, but decided to leave it at that once he realized that regardless of Lalli's possible implication in the fire or Emil's death, it had still killed Tuuri. Helena had told him that intentionally forcing people's bad memories to the surface when you barely knew them was never a good idea.

During dinner, Helena couldn't help noticing how sparse the family to which Lalli had returned three years ago was. The current head of the household was Taru Hollola, who had been _second_ cousins with Lalli's deceased _father_. Lalli's mother wasn't anywhere to be seen, either. Actually, the only other person related to Lalli by blood around that table was Onni, who had been Tuuri's older brother. His wife Cecilia was the one who had come up with the blueberry tea blend that Helena liked so much. She didn't speak any Scandi, but knew a little of the Shared Tongue native to Reynir's land. Helena ended up spending most of the meal talking with her, and by that means finding out about the family's story:  
-Eleven years ago, Onni and Lalli's grandmother did something to this island before disappearing. The land spent five years unable to grow any plants, until Onni and I managed to start fixing things. Food had to be bought from elsewhere during that time. It became desirable to have as many people as possible earning a living outside the island. Taru somehow got acquainted with King Torbjörn in her youth, so she was able to send Tuuri to work at the Scandi Royal palace and have Lalli go with her. She did it knowing what could happen if the Prince didn't "pick a toy" before a certain date.  
Helena was quite sure she now knew more about the procedure than Emil had ever cared to find out. The back-up plan for the heir not asking for anyone specific was for the True Rulers to choose someone among the servants, and sometimes the servant's dependents, in the guise of their Council role. There tended to always be at least one suitable person who wasn't in a position to refuse within that pool. Being "picked" was hence a potential hazard of starting serve the Royal Family before the heir turned sixteen while not being significantly older than them. Considering what the True Rulers had planned to do on Emil's sixteenth birthday all along, the choice of Lalli made sense: choosing the archives as a starting point for the fire would have made Tuuri a very likely accidental victim, if not an intentional one. Putting Lalli in a position of danger as well made one less relative and trio-mate to worry about. Considering all Lalli had gone through, Helena was happy to see things had apparently gotten better for him since then, and that his family had, from what she could tell, welcomed him back with open arms. Maybe there was still hope for her and Sune. If only she could figure out why both of them still missed Tobias so deeply months after the effect of the last pills they had been forced to ingest should have faded, and still found it impossible to fall asleep without each other nearby.

xxxx

It was morning. Both Helena and Sune were alive and well after a good night's sleep in one of the house's spare beds, which was nice considering the risks that had inherently come with accepting to stay in Stig's home. Unfortunately, they couldn't linger in bed for too long. One of the conditions under which Ylva had authorized them to break their loose house arrest was that she wanted to see both of their faces before noon today. After that, they would be allowed to stay out of the house until evening as long as they didn't leave the meandrous street going from Adam and Ylva's home to the pier that considered itself the local "Scandi neighborhood". At breakfast, Lalli looked exhausted and was almost falling asleep on Stig's shoulder. Stig was true to his usual self when Helena remarked that it looked somewhat uncomfortable:  
-Honestly, he's fallen asleep in more uncomfortable positions after his more tiring guard shifts. I have no idea how he hasn't developed a back problem yet… hey Lalli, I love you, but could you try not drooling on my hair?

Helena took advantage of the lack of other nearby boats making their way to the bigger island to try getting more out of Stig:  
-Yesterday, Reynir told me that you, him, Lalli, Sigrun and Mikkel found something out, and were considering telling me and Sune. Do we qualify to hear it yet?  
-No, but you are much closer to it than a couple days ago. All five of us may still need to leave town because of it one day, and I wanted the two of you a least have a vague idea of the reason, should it ever happen. As for actually telling you what it is, there are few more things we need to check for, and one of them is whether you're sure it's good time for you to find it out. I know the two of you have your own problems, and may not want new ones if you can help it.  
-Thanks for the tip, but it's going to be a little hard to know whether I want to know that secret of yours or not if all I know about it is that it will bring more trouble to my life.  
Helena could almost see Stig's cheeks going as red as his beard's current color:  
-I… never thought of that. The two of you are the first people we're thinking of letting in on it ever since we had to tell Lalli's family upon moving in. I guess our means of vetting people need work.  
Sune, who had been silently staring at a random point ever since the beginning of the trip, spoke:  
-Maybe you could include using that hair dye into it. And seeing how people react to Lalli's drool washing part of it off.  
Stig briefly looked worried, but continued paddling, knowing how important it was for all three them to get to the bigger island sooner rather than later:  
-How much came off?  
Helena looked for the spot as much as she could from where she was sitting, but couldn't see anything. Sune answered Stig's question:  
-Just enough that I can see you're actually a blonde from where I'm sitting. But you should be able to hide the spot if you braid it correctly. Your hair's long enough.  
-I'll actually pay you if you can do it.

Sune made use of his craft as soon as the three of them were ashore, and Stig actually did give him a small coin for his trouble. He was soon off to the nearby marketplace for the day, and to take advantage of the time of day at which people usually noticed they were out of tea. Helena walked towards Ylva's office, more grateful than ever that her cousin's wife was among her discrete supporters. Helena took advantage of the walk to satisfy her curiosity:  
-So, what shade of blonde was it?  
Sune lifted one of his own golden blond locks:  
-Quite close to that, actually.  
-So I've been getting a glimpse of his real hair color while hanging out with you all along. It's a nice color to have though, I'm surprised someone who likes having nice hair as much as he does is covering it up.  
She got a strange impression, similar to the one she got when her words came out making less sense than what they had in her mind. She mentally repeated her words, but couldn't figure out what part had come out wrong. She continued walking, watching the neighborhood's inhabitants engaging in their morning activities. She found herself paying more attention to their hair color than usual, and gradually noticing that as long as the small sample of Scandi people living on this island were concerned, nobody had a shade of blonde anything close to Sune's.


	3. Power shift

**Power shift**

Kenneth, who was King Torbjörn's councilor for foreign relations, was the one to bring the news to the other members of the Royal Council sat at a semi-circle shaped table:  
-Princess Helena got the opportunity to prove that she actually does know a spell that can counteract the effect of "love pills". Mages are coming to the outer Saimaa island on which she lives to learn it. Some people are spending enough time with her to realize the rumors are just that. It's only a matter of time before the false information that was disseminated after her escape loses its hold.  
Tobias, the counselor on matters related to magic, pounded the table in frustration:  
-How did she do it without breaking any laws? One of the purposes of that false information was to take all credibility away from any demonstration she could do on herself or a volunteer. Only the parents of a child who had the pill forced upon them would be desperate enough to give her a chance to demonstrate, and that foolish princess has too many morals to arrange for such a thing to happen.  
Kenneth explained:  
-A sweet seller – and no, the Princess Helena has _not_ started selling sweets during the last six months –forced a "love pill" onto her host's ten-year-old daughter. Prince Sune was the other child involved in the would-be "test", so he knew to not ingest the pill given to him and was able to get the girl out of the sweet seller's room before things really started.  
Kenneth was referring to the window that happened between the pill being ingested and moment the body was lost to much of its owner's control in favor of an overwhelming craving for both giving and receiving any form of affection. Vivian was the next to speak:  
-Tobias, do you remember when I told you to not underestimate the lack of morals that exists outside this room? This is precisely what I was talking about. There are other people besides you who make children take "love pills" in the name of science, and it seems like either Adam or Ylva Solberg was acquainted with one of them without knowing it.  
While all seven of them were in theory of equal power, facts put Vivian one step above everyone else. The number of seven councilors was intended to avoid any ties while voting for a course of action. However, one particular councilor position, that was currently held by Vivian, had come to be the one breaking most ties. Part of the wisdom councilor's job was to listen to everyone else's point of view on various issues and come up with a solution that was feasible considering all that had been put forward. Whatever decision she came to would officially become the King's once a second meeting happened in his presence. During that second meeting, the six others were only to present the parts of their point of view that Vivian had retained for her decision. Because of this, Vivian was the person the councilors for magic, foreign relations, national relations, nature, money and law needed to convince the most with their arguments, convincing each other being only secondary. Over time, the need to be on the wisdom councilor's good side had turned into an expectation of deference to them. In turn, the wisdom councilor tended to have a authoritarian attitude towards the six other councilors, regardless of relative age. Vivian continued speaking:  
-If she gains the public's trust, she may be a problem. Some people may want to see her and Prince Sune on the throne, maybe even in the Royal Council. We need to make sure she stays out of the public's favor. Tobias, you already used the "that secret magic laboratory with a bed and shackles in it is absolutely not mine, it's Princess Helena's" card. I'm going to be disappointed if you don't have any back-up plans.  
Tobias suddenly adopted his idea of a relaxed posture, which always managed to come across as slightly smug:  
-As a matter of fact, I do. Tell me Randi, what is the status of the rumors according to which Prince Emil is still alive?  
Randi was the councilor for national relations and had to stay aware of everyday happenings among ordinary citizens as part of her job.  
-Enough mages have examined the grave for anyone willing to believe it to know that it isn't Prince Emil's body in there. A couple of different people were thorough enough in their investigation to figure out that the body is actually Tuuri Hotakainen's and that there aren't any remains of Prince Emil or Tuuri's trio-mates among the burnt remains that have been buried elsewhere. There doesn't seem to be much of a consensus about what to make of this information among those who are listening. Remarks go from "it was a giant fire in the Royal Palace, of course there was a lot of human error involved in dealing with the dead" to "I bet he's secretly working to get his throne back". The possibility is doing a good job at distracting some of the sharper minds from our other activities, if anything else.  
The smugness in Tobias' expression only increased:  
-In that case, I have a couple of… props that may interest all of you.

If it weren't for the fact that a spell was necessary for her to even move on her own, Tobias' "flesh puppet" could pass for a two-year-old girl:  
-I had plenty of opportunities to harvest genetical material from Princess Helena and Prince Sune, and use it for some of my own experiments. This one, I set to age at a natural pace, and to take after Princess Helena. She is completely unaware I made it. One word from any of you, and it can turn up where you wish: orphanage, underground slave market, home of a father who has had to care for it after its mother abandoned it.  
Randi spoke:  
-I see how this could help us with Princess Helena's reputation. I'm afraid I'm failing to see how this has anything to do with the question you asked me about Prince Emil. Unless you're considering him as a possible father, which seems needlessly complicated considering the number of times you've probably cornered Princess Helena and Prince Sune into doing things that could realistically produce a child.  
Tobias was more than happy to answer:  
-I grew another one of those. A boy, or rather a young man of nineteen years in terms of appearance. It takes after Prince Sune.  
Among King Torbjörn and Queen Siv's two sons, Sune had always been the one considered to resemble a younger Emil the most. Everyone knew who, exactly, something made to look like a nineteen-year-old version of Sune could pass for. As all seven councilors seemed in deep thought, Tanja, the councilor for matters of law, spoke:  
-Their legal status if they are discovered by someone who will be taken seriously will be tricky, to say the least. Not to mention that as long as there is no body, even we cannot be completely certain Prince Emil didn't survive the fire, regardless of our official stance about it. Should he happen to be alive, however, this may be a good way to draw him out it the open and make sure he's no longer a potential problem.

xxxx

Being dressed for a temperature much higher than the current one didn't change the fact that she was sweating from just about everywhere it was possible to sweat from. This had also brought her to the realization that the fabric of her dress was more prone to clinging to her body when a little wet than she thought it was. A couple tunics and a light cloak had been offered to her, but they only made Helena feel more uncomfortable and retained more of the excessive body heat that badly needed to escape. In addition to this, just about anything that could be taken as an indication that she was romantically involved with a person who wasn't Sune would attract unnecessary and unwanted attention towards the person in question, especially from Tobias. The combination of the real situation, the official story and what those who could handle neither imagined had somehow resulted into many acting as if Helena and Sune were betrothed to each other, even though it had never officially been the case. The cold, hard, fact that Tobias' treatment had left both of them unable to fall asleep without the other physically being in the same bed didn't help matters.

This brought Helena's thoughts back to one of the reasons she was back in the Scandi Royal Palace after half a year of self-exile in Finmi. Between the memories that her own mind prevented her from visiting and those that had never had the opportunity to form due to the nature of the experiment Tobias had been conducting that day, her memories of those two and a half years of regular torment were very patchy to say the least. She was still dead certain she had never been pregnant during that time. She, however, had a slight idea of how a child related to her, or at least something that could pass as one to a mage looking for kinship, could exist. It had been impossible for her to not notice that something was off about Tobias' body. Her first tip-off had been the fact that she had only ever had to actively prevent conception after her forced "sessions" with Sune, while those with Tobias had never required it. When she had first noticed this, she had assumed Tobias to merely be sterile. But during those moments where she had been unable to do anything but watch while her body either moved on its own or let things happen, she had noticed other odd things: his hair was always the exact same length, his nails never felt different when dug into the same part of her body a handful of days apart. As his own body had been getting closer to that of an adult man, Sune had noticed a couple of strange things, as well. There had also been many more or less serious injuries inflicted upon Tobias during those times, some accidental, some very voluntary. She was sure she had seen cuts heal under her very eyes, and the man quickly recover from, if not outright shrug off, things that should have done a number on the inside of his body. For someone who liked boasting about his various accomplishments, especially to her and Sune in circumstances in which they were unable to leave, Tobias had been strangely insistent that Helena was imagining things the one time she had asked him about it. She wouldn't be surprised that if a realistic fake human body could be made with the help of magic, it would still require some actual human component somewhere along the line. This only made her even more intrigued by the news of Emil being found alive, that had come to her ears a strangely short time after patrons at the tavern had started accusing her of having abandoned a child she had never had.

A guard came into the waiting room and addressed Helena and Sune:  
-The two of you are next.  
As both of them stood up, Stig, Lalli and Sigrun did so as well.  
-I hope you'll understand that I'd rather have my own escort with me.  
The guard nodded. This wasn't a rare request for people of high status who knew themselves to be on metaphorical thin ice with whoever they considered to be in charge between the royal family and the True Rulers. Nobody had ever been allowed to be in a secured room with enough people to overwhelm the guards that were inside, but enough of a retinue to fend off an assassination attempt was usually tolerated. For all she suspected that this whole situation to be a trap, the only way for Helena to get an idea of the exact nature of the trap was to step right into it.

As she entered the room, Helena promptly spotted the little girl on Vivian's lap. Vivian was just as Helena remembered her: chin-length dark brown hair ornamented with her function's silver headdress that was a little fancier than the that of the other councilors, a matching silver breastplate worn over a simple dark green long-sleeved dress. There was an orphanage in Mora that literally existed for the current councilor of wisdom to sponsor to the extent to which they considered fitting and help their public image. Children from that orphanage under the age of three were all dressed in the same outfit, which the girl was currently wearing. If this was indeed a ploy Tobias had come up with, it made sense for the girl to be "found" in Vivian's orphanage. The place had so many charges that it was believable for a single child to be ignored until attention was drawn to them. She next looked at the high judge's bench at which Tanja was sitting, her dress the same shade of gray as her hair. While being a qualified judge was a requirement to be the councilor for law, having them judge your case indicated that the matter was considered high-profile. To her right was Randi, her surprisingly curly and messy elbow-length straw-colored hair battling with her headdress for the title of most visible thing on the top of her head in spite of the low ponytail in which it was secured. The best solutions to various situations, that included a child's custody, were sometimes things that weren't spelled out in the law, yet would work best for everyone involved. Randi was there to make Tanja aware of the existing publicly acceptable solutions if they were needed, which made Helena really wonder what kind of outcome the True Rulers had planned for. Helena scanned the spectator benches, and was relieved to see no sign of Tobias. This made Vivian the most likely to be the mage who would test for kinship. The contents of a wheeled chair installed in a corner of the room, however, caught her eye:  
-Emil.  
Before she managed to get a good look at him, Tanja's voice reminded her of the reason of her presence:  
-Let's do this kinship test already.  
Helena sat in the defender's chair, while Sigrun took the seat that would have belonged to her legal representative if she had come with one. Stig and Lalli were to keep an eye on Sune and watch for any sudden moves in the room. Vivian got up from her seat, walked to Helena, shifted her hold on the toddler in such a way that the arm carrying her was also holding her hand, and used her free hand to hold Helena's. This was going to take a while, even for someone as experienced a Vivian, so Helena decided to give the little girl a good look. She quickly saw that the girl lacked any in-born life force, and was animated entirely by an elaborate set of spells. Helena could also detect plenty of surveillance spells just by looking at her. Whatever the toddler was seeing and hearing at the moment, chances were that it was going right back to whoever had cast the spells in one form or another. That, combined with the likely identity of the little girl's maker, explained why Tobias had not bothered to come. Helena got a glimpse of what the plan was: declare that they were related, make the girl her responsibility, give the True Rulers an extra pair of eyes and ears into wherever the girl was brought and Tobias a means to force himself back into Helena's life. As she continued looking, she noticed there were at least a couple of other spells whose function had nothing to do with animating the girl or using her as spy.  
-You're this this child's mother.  
Vivian collapsed before Helena had the time to pull the toddler out of her arm. The court medic rushed to examine her, while Helena asked for Sigrun's tunic and wrapped the little girl in it. Whatever had struck Vivian had come from the girl, so she wasn't taking any chances.  
-Someone used a spell through the girl! Whoever wants to handle her _must_ avoid any skin contact!  
Meanwhile, Vivian's eyes opened, and she sat up:  
-Calm down Princess, I'm fine. Whoever did this seems to have merely wanted to cause a scare. They will be found and dealt with. It does seem that I hit my head a little upon falling, though. I should get this checked properly. I seem to have done what was needed of me here anyway. Tanja, Randi, the rest of this is in your hands.  
Vivian left the room on her own two feet, if followed by a worried court medic.

Helena gave the room a quick survey, and could tell from Tanja and Randi's faces that they definitely hadn't expected what had just happened. She however also knew that it wasn't going to affect them for much longer: according to Tobias, double-crossing was almost routine among the True Rulers. It took Helena a few moments to realize that the toddler wasn't moving at all. Worried about what it could mean, she lay her down on the floor in the lateral security position, and examined the spells contained within her. The more thorough examination told her that whatever had hit Vivian wasn't any of the spells permanently nested into the girl; having the surveillance spells be of any use, however, required her to be a good channel for long-distance magic. The channel could be used by just about any mage who noticed its presence, which seemed like a foolish thing to overlook, but kept whoever was doing the surveillance from being the only possible suspect. One of the things Helena found made her raise an eyebrow: there now seemed to be a human mind inside the girl, despite the fact that Helena had perceived such a thing to be absent from her mere moments before. The tapping of Tanja's hammer interrupted both Helena's train of thought and her magical investigation:  
-Does the child require medical assistance?  
Helena addressed Tanja:  
-Not that I can tell. She seems to have merely fallen asleep and looks like she will eventually wake up on her own.  
-I see. In that case, here is the situation. I understand that those who feel they will be inadequate parents may abandon their children. I have also been wary of parents coming take their children back, as they are often doing so for selfish reasons that are harmful to the child. Your actions during the last few minutes have shown you to be more responsible than many parents who have actually come to me with the intent of getting their child back. I hence consider that this child can be put under your care.  
Tanja's hammer resonated on the table a second time.

xxxx

The quarters they had been given for the night were in portion of the palace that had been rebuilt after the fire. The bedroom for the women and Sune had already had a bed for the girl when it had been shown to Helena and Sigrun. The girl had yet to wake up, and Helena was reading through her – most likely fake – records from the orphanage. Making those fake records had required coming up with a name for the girl, and Helena saw no immediate reason to change it, since she actually kind of liked it. She would still need to test pronouncing it around the girl several times in case it was the trigger word for some spell nested inside her that was best not activated too often. She had tried to find out more about the mind that was now inside the girl, but the spell that worked as a mind container of sorts prevented her from doing just that. Without that knowledge, her own mind had gone to the worst-case scenario, which wasn't that far-fetched given the lack of any encounters with Tobias during the day. She didn't dare ask those living in the palace for any news of him, as she didn't want to be mistaken for caring about his well-being. She didn't know what to do besides looking out for anything odd, and telling the others to do the same. On the off-chance she was right, however, it was probably best to put the girl somewhere she would be out of Helena's everyday life yet well cared for, all while being unlikely to see or hear anything of real use to the True Rulers. This excluded any relatives she had in Scandi. Adam's house would maybe work, but didn't quite fit the "out of her everyday life" bill. She could maybe ask Stig and Lalli if she could live somewhere on their island. The two of them had gone to the market with Sune to get some food, as nobody in the group was in the mood to trust anything brought in by palace servants.

As she wanted to go straight to bed after eating, Helena decided to wash up and change into her sleepwear while waiting for the men to come back. Once she was done, her attention was drawn to the fact that the girl had been laid onto the bed in full clothing aside from her shoes, and the closest thing she had to a blanket was the tunic belonging to Sigrun in which she had been wrapped earlier. Helena thought it might be a good idea to wrap her hands in bandages, to limit the risks of whatever had happened to Vivian happening to someone else. Sigrun poked her head into the door just as Helena had located the first aid kit:  
-The guys are back with food. Any preference on where to eat?  
-Here would be best.  
The room had both a balcony that let fresh air in and a low table big enough for everyone to sit around. A noise coming from the smallest bed told Helena the girl had woken up.

-Janine?  
The girl, who still looked tired, didn't respond, be it in a visible way or via any of the spells nested inside her. This made the name in the orphanage records even more likely to be one that hadn't been associated with her until very recently. Helena, Lalli and Sune all feeling a little awkward around her had resulted in Stig being the one trying to figure out if she liked anything among the food that had been brought from the market. Come to think of it, Helena wasn't sure Janine needed to eat. She didn't remember ever seeing Tobias doing so. The toddler eventually found interest in a type of vegetable garnished pastry that was usually hated by children, but adored by adults. She was small enough that only one of them would be enough to fill her stomach. As the meal drew to a close and what hadn't been eaten was being put away so some of them could have it for breakfast, Helena noticed that Sune's shopping bag was still bulky:  
-Is that more food?  
Sune grabbed the bag and started fumbling inside it:  
-There was a stall selling child gloves. We remembered what had happened to councilor Vivian this afternoon, so we got her some.  
Sune handed her a pair of light blue thin gloves. Helena had to admit it would be more practical than her idea of using bandages.  
-And what else is in there?  
Between them, the three men had apparently decided they absolutely needed to get Janine a nightgown, a second pair of gloves, a hooded tunic, an undershirt, a pair of pants, a dress, a couple of hair ribbons, socks, an extra pair of shoes and a cloth doll. Sune looked a little embarrassed:  
-I hope you don't think it's too much. I'm guessing you don't want this treated as if we just had a child or something like that. I went with it mostly because I thought it would be a good idea to at least get her out of the orphanage outfit.  
Helena sighed:  
-They arranged to dump her on me precisely so I'll look bad if I try getting rid of her or seem to not be caring for her. I'm not exactly in a position to complain about you guys getting her stuff if you feel like doing it. How do you feel about an early night?

xxxx

By mid-afternoon the next day, Sigrun barely even dared _think_ the words "at least that day can't get any stranger". Little after Helena and Sune had fallen asleep, a servant had come with the news that the councilor who had spent two and a half years tormenting them had been found dead, and had apparently been so since some time in the afternoon. One of the consequences of this had been, of course, that they could say goodbye to their plan of leaving the palace the next day; anyone leaving it during the following week outside of a very restricted number of reasons would immediately make themselves suspicious. This, in turn, had made it impossible for Helena and Sune to refuse an invitation to a private lunch with Sune's family, including whoever or whatever had been standing in for Emil in the courtroom. In turn, this had made Sigrun, "Stig" and Lalli realize they had run out of good reasons to hide their secret from Helena any longer, and decide to tell her and Sune the parts of it that they now absolutely needed to know before going to the lunch: they had been helping an Emil who was unmistakably the real one hide in Finmi ever since the fire three years ago, and knew exactly where he currently was. This meant that it was literally impossible for the one from the courtroom, that Helena would see again at the lunch, to be anything else than an impostor. The lunch itself, combined with what they had learned during the morning, had left Helena and Sune _really_ needing to have an afternoon nap. The only information Helena had delivered before falling asleep had been confirming Lalli's suspicion that the fake Emil was something similar to Janine.

Janine, while looking less tired than the previous day, still sounded like whoever had made her had not found it necessary to give her even toddler-level speech. She seemed to hear people perfectly fine, on the other hand. "Stig" was keeping her busy, while Lalli was catching up on his own sleep after having been on watch for most of the night. As soon as Helena had found out about her tormenter being found dead, the time synchronization between the apparent time of death and the moment at which she had first perceived a mind inside the girl had not been lost on her; in fact, it only seemed to confirm what she had already been suspecting. Sigrun couldn't help voicing her concern:  
-Doesn't it disturb you that the guy who hurt Helena and Sune could be in there?  
-If it's him, being treated like a two-year-old girl who just got adopted into a new family can't be fun. In that case, I'm making him pay it back well within the bounds of the law. If it isn't him, it feels wrong to shun whoever is in there because of the surveillance spells.  
-Even if it's not Tobias, how can we be sure it's someone who has nothing to do with the surveillance spells in there?  
As soon as the sentence left her lips, Sigrun realized that they had yet to discuss who – or what – could be inside the girl besides Tobias' mind with Helena. That bunch of nobles and merchants was smart, so having the mind inside the girl actually being the one Helena would suspect, especially after Tobias would be found dead, seemed too simple a plan coming from them. On the other hand, she also knew it was a bad idea to make a plan more complicated than it actually needed to be, and maybe that level of complexity had been sufficient for what they needed. This still raised a question of its own:  
-If it's not Tobias in there, who would it be?  
From "Stig's" expression, Sigrun could tell she had hit the nail in the head. "Stig" only had the following to say about the subject:  
-I haven't lived here for three years and wasn't exactly paying attention to the political scene when I was. I think this is something we should ask Helena and maybe Sune once they wake up.

Janine, who had so far seemed to find having the doll being wiggled in front of her to be a perfectly satisfying form of entertainment, suddenly grabbed the doll out of "Stig's" hand and got close as she could to his face. As neither Sigrun nor "Stig" were mages, it was unfortunately impossible which of the forces animating her had been triggered by "Stig's" words. Whichever force it was, it either quickly found what it was looking for or gave up its investigation. The girl's attention shifted from "Stig's" face to the doll she was holding, then the room as a whole. She next toddled all the way to Helena's night table that had her jewelry box on it, grabbed her broad silver bracelet and arranged it on the doll in such a way that it now looked like the toy was wearing a breast plate over the dress that was its only item of clothing. After a little extra rustling, she found a metal hair accessory that, once pressed on the doll's forehead, made it look like she was wearing a silver headdress. Once she was done, she seemed very insistent that "Stig" get a good look at it. Sigrun couldn't help but comment:  
-I don't know what you're trying to do, but do you mind letting me have a look at it as well? This one can be a little dense at times.  
- _I_ am "a little dense at times"? When you have you mind set on something, even Mikkel has to tell you it's not a good idea at least three times before you let go.  
Sigrun wasn't sure what to make of the fact that the little girl's immediate reaction was a look that seemed to say "is it me or I am I the most mature person who's currently awake?". While the noise didn't seem to have disturbed Helena and Sune a tiny bit – or maybe they were just that tired – Lalli started shifting a little. He was soon awake and came to see what was happening. "Stig" quickly shared their worries and asked for his input:  
-Nobody is watching through her right now. The doll looks like the lady in the green dress like this.  
Janine energetically nodded. Sigrun had to admit it was far from obvious, considering neither the doll's hair nor her dress looked anything like Vivian's.  
-So what does it mean? Do you want to see Vivian?  
The girl seemed pensive, then answered with a brief, but visible nod.  
-We'll ask Helena whether this is a good idea or not once she wakes up from her nap, okay?  
Janine seemed disappointed at Sigrun's words, but the rest of her response consisted of getting the two pieces of jewelry off the doll and putting them back in the box in which they belonged. Lalli spoke again:  
-Are you Tobias?  
Janine shook her head. "Stig" sighed:  
-Lalli, of course she's going to answer "no" to that, regardless of whether it's true or not. Wait, this means we can ask her "yes" or "no" questions to which she would not lie.  
Sigrun felt she had to point out the obvious problem with the idea:  
-And what kind of question would that be, if whoever is in there is bent on deceiving us?  
Before anyone awake could come up with an answer, a noise came from "Stig" and Lalli's room, which was closer to the main hallway than the one in which they currently all where. Janine was left with "Stig", while Sigrun and Lalli entered the room to find that someone had collapsed on the bed. It didn't take long for Sigrun to recognize the mess of straw-colored curls that made Reynir's hair look tame. Further examination revealed fresh whiplashes and a lack of proper clothes.

While Helena hadn't needed to actually use any of the spells Tyra had taught her in exchange for being taught the counter to "love pills", the was little room for imagination as to the circumstances in which Randi had received those whiplashes. For now, sympathy overrode any resentment Helena had against Randi for being part of the handful of people who had known what Tobias was doing to her and Sune, had done nothing to stop it, and most likely participated in disseminating the false story in which Helena was the person who shouldn't be trusted:  
-Randi, who did this to you?  
-Vivian has been acting strange since she fell yesterday. I made sure she was examined by three different mages with medical knowledge, and they all told me it wasn't serious and she just needed to rest it off for a couple days. She cares enough about her work that there is only one way to make her stay in bed that long.  
Helena saw where this was going:  
-You two had started seeing each other before Sune and I had to run away. Are you telling me she's the one who did this to you?  
Randi nodded, and tears streamed down her cheeks:  
-It was the first time she did something like that. We did get "love pills" involved a few times before this, and it was fun. But this time, it looked like she wanted to see how much she could hurt me and have me still want her. She started with telling me mean things, then started injuring me. Then I realized that she had forgotten how fast I burn trough the pills, so I ran away a soon as I could.  
As Helena wondered who in the world forgot how long "love pills" acted on a regular partner, she realized that what Randi had described sounded worryingly familiar. Had Vivian taken to Tobias' idea of a good time? Her mind somehow came up with an even more sinister possibility. Could she have been completely off the mark as to where Tobias had sent his mind before "dying"? But if this was the case, what had happened to Vivian's mind? As if to answer her question, Janine climbed onto the bed and pressed a handkerchief under Randi's eyes. Randi winced at even that brief contact, before clearly realizing the oddity of an artificially-created toddler coming to dry her tears. Helena voiced the idea before anyone else could:  
-Vivian?  
The little girl turned to her and nodded. Helena's legs found themselves unable to support her as she realized, what, exactly had actually happened in that courtroom the previous afternoon.


	4. Puppet Prince

**Puppet prince**

The fake Emil, aside from having been quickly grown into an adult, was even more of a half-hearted job than "Janine" was, to the point Helena was surprised to see him pick up his own cup of tea and drink it after Stig set it in front of him. As soon as he had finished giving tea to the Royal household, Stig came to stand right next to Helena, nervously clutching the metal tray he had been using to carry the cups:  
-I hope you will like it. I tried to take advantage of the better selection of ingredients.  
Helena picked up her own cup, blew on it, and sipped from it. Her opportunity to compliment Stig was drowned out by the praise from Sune's parents and siblings. Siv tried asking the fake Emil what he thought of his tea, but his only response was to continue drinking it. Emil being "found alive" had been all the True Rulers had ever needed, nothing more, nothing less. Him being "found" in a quasi-catatonic and speechless state conveniently both accounted for him not showing any sign of life on his own for three years and what had happened to him during that time remaining unknown. It also kept his "return" from bringing too much of a shuffle to their plans to put one of Sune's siblings on the throne. The Royal Council's desire to avoid being too obvious about the country's nominal ruler being their puppet resulted in the existence of physical and mental health requirements to be able to sit on the throne. These rules also happened to be so finicky that they could be used to kick someone out of the line of succession on little more than the Council's collective whim, as it had been done for Sune.

In the version of the events that Sune's family had been fed by the Royal Council, Helena and Tobias had simply had a personal quarrel that had escalated out of control, to the point that they had both ended up accusing each other of the worse thing they could think of; Tobias had simply been more successful in being believed by the general public. That had kept them from wondering why Vivian hadn't gotten Tobias replaced in spite of the "incident", all while giving them a reason for which neither Helena nor Sune would want to have Tobias around if they could help it. This, unfortunately, also made them look more likely to be involved in his death than other people who had been staying in the palace at the time at which it had taken place. Those stilted private meals, for which she and Sune had a daily standing invitation while the investigation of Tobias' "death" kept them from leaving the palace, were being held on the off-chance that they ended up being their last "family time" before someone went to jail. On day four, Helena had had the strength to attend, but not hold a conversation. Sune's own silence had indicated that he was in a similar state. Stig had also admitted to have started getting bored. As Helena and Sune's presence had been requested for tea time that day, she had offered to have Stig make tea for everyone. Her idea had apparently worked, given that Stig was currently doing most of the talking. And the tea was really good, considering it was made by someone who had only been in the tea business for a little more than a couple of years. Maybe Stig's drunken idea of becoming one of the biggest tea sellers in Scandi wasn't as overambitious as she had initially thought. Everyone who could was already asking Stig to prepare a new pot with a different blend. That was a very good sign and a way to see if he was lucky, or actually that good. The second pot started to point towards "actually that good". By the third, Helena's mind had suddenly become alert, without knowing to what, exactly. She realized what she should have been alert to all along upon Torbjörn's comment on the fourth pot:  
-Congratulations, young man! You made my favorite blend even better!  
How had she not noticed earlier? Helena had never picked a favorite blend before tasting the one made by Stig's cousin-in-law; even that had been more of a default due to none of the other tea blends sold by Stig back in Finmi or regularly purchased from other merchants by Adam's household lining up with her tastes. Because of this, Helena had tasted the favorites of various members of the royal family several times. Thanks to Torbjörn's comment, she now recognized the first pot of the afternoon as Håkan's favorite, but with an extra ingredient. The second had been a similar enhancement on Anna's favorite. The third had been a tastier version of Siv's. A new recipe for Torbjörn's had been last. Sune had had a favorite at a time, but Tobias had been perfectly aware of what it was, and used it in ways that now made it impossible for Sune to drink it without reflexively spitting it out. Stig had found this out the hard way while trying to find a Finmi tea he might like.

As soon as they were dismissed and out of hearing range of Sune's family, Helena asked Stig how he had known about the tea. He instantly pulled out a folded piece of paper:  
-When I told Emil I was going to come here, he gave me this in case I somehow ended up serving tea to them. As little as I like Finmi tea, I did try to figure out how the flavors worked a little to be able to sell people things they would like. Yesterday, I took that paper out to occupy myself and got a few ideas. I didn't imagine I would get to actually put them in practice. Thank you for that, by the way.  
Helena opened her hand near the one in which Stig was holding the piece of paper:  
-Can I?  
Stig gave her the piece of paper, which she unfolded and held in such a way that Sune could have a look as well. It took a few moments for her to take the contents in:  
-Wow. I always thought that he didn't care what people other than himself liked. Is that really from him?  
-Yep. He started paying attention just so his long-distance gifts weren't completely off the mark when he realized this could be a problem. This somehow stayed even after he had to give up on all the fancy royal stuff.  
How little Helena still knew about the circumstances in which the real Emil had been hiding was a testimony to just how many other things she had on her plate when she wasn't sleeping off as much of the whole mess as she could manage. Tobias having moved his mind to Vivian's body rather than actually dying. Vivian's mind being inside a mute artificially-created body in the form of a two-year old girl. Said mute two-year old girl being Helena's daughter as far as the general public was concerned. Her "strange bedfellows" alliance with Vivian's literal bed fellow, whom Tobias had started mistreating almost as soon as the move to Vivian's body had taken place. This must have been the first time in days that she had been able to properly think about anything else:  
-That time I complained about him at the tavern…  
-Don't worry about this. Most of it was still quite true three years ago and that was how you had ever known him.  
Just as Helena was letting out a sigh of relief at Stig's words, it was apparently Sune's turn to be hit with a long-overdue realization of what the real Emil still being alive meant:  
-Lalli…  
Stig fortunately answered several of the questions that Sune was most likely to be meaning to ask:  
-Yes, he's the one who saved him. He knows he's supposed to lie to people who ask about this unless they already know. That's what happened when you asked him about it last month. As for our marriage, yes, Emil is fine with it.  
Helena realized she hadn't really thought about what Emil being alive meant for the "job" Lalli had been officially meant to start on the day of the fire, and the fact that he was currently married to someone else. Fortunately, between them, the three years of Emil being officially dead, Lalli having returned to Finmi during that time and the fake Emil's official current mental state meant nobody was expecting him to hold that "job" in regards to the fake Emil.

As soon as they got back to their quarters, Stig went to lie down next to Lalli's sleeping form. Helena and Sune decided it might be a good idea to follow his example and went to their own room. Instead of Sigrun and Vivian, they found a note on the table they all used for meals:  
-Sign language class.  
For various reasons, its was in everyone's interest for Vivian to spend at least a few hours outside of their quarters per day. One of the excuses for such outings had been giving the mute child that she appeared to be sign language classes. Given the unfortunate reason for which children sometimes ended up in the orphanage she funded, sign language was something Vivian actually already knew. If anything, she was the one teaching it to everyone else. That time was in reality spent exchanging information with Randi, who was now their little group's eyes and ears in the Royal Council. This came at the price of her also being the Council's go-to person for getting information about their little group, in addition to the eyes and ears they already had on them via "Janine".

Helena and Sune barely had time to kick their shoes off before Lalli walked across their room and left it by jumping off the balcony, in spite of the fact that the room he shared with Stig was right next to the actual hallway leading outside. Soon after they lied down and tried falling asleep, they heard a couple of cats hissing and having a brief fight nearby. Right as Helena thought it had ended, Lalli came back by the balcony, a light grey long-haired cat under his arm and a fresh set of scratches on his face. He walked back into the room he shared with Stig without a word. Helena was definitely going to take a while to fall asleep now:  
-Uh… What just happened?  
Sune seemed to be wondering the same thing. They slowly crept to the doorway shared between the suite's two bedrooms, and listened. Stig spoke, sounding like he was about to cry:  
-Thanks. Will your face be okay?  
-It happens each time I get close to one of those. I don't care. They make you better when you're sad.  
Helena could hear the cat starting to purr loudly, and realized she and Sune probably should _actually_ leave those two alone, and try to find out what was going on later.

Helena didn't get much sleep before she heard a cat's snarl coming from Stig and Lalli's room. When she and Sune rushed inside, they found Stig trying to appease the grey cat, while Sigrun was wrapping as much of her body as she could around Vivian:  
-Stig, how about you get that cat out of here?  
Helena swore she saw the cat almost instantly calm down as Stig brought it closer to the balcony. By the time Stig let go of it, it had moved from struggling to escape his arms to rubbing against him:  
-You need to go away now. Shoo… Shoo…  
The half-hearted attempts to push the cat away resulted in the palms of Stig's hands being rubbed against instead of his arms. Lalli rolled his eyes, came closer to Stig and the cat, and hissed at the latter, who finally left. Vivian, meanwhile, was staring at her exposed forearm, looking bemused. Sigrun explained the cause before Helena could ask:  
-That's odd, I swear that cat gave her a nasty scratch. And I'm quite sure it got her face, too.  
The was nothing remotely resembling a scratch on the face that was currently Vivian's. Helena quickly made the connection with her own memories:  
-Maybe not. I know I've seen scratches heal on Tobias' arms within seconds. It's probably a property of those artificial bodies of his.  
Vivian clapped her hands, signaling she wanted attention. With a few gestures that they were all able to read, she was able to convey that Tobias hadn't been particularly liked by cats. A quick volunteer operation by Sune and a startled wheeled chair attendant later, cats turned out to not be particularly fond of the fake Emil either. While this was an interesting bit of knowledge, Helena wasn't sure how it could have any kind of actual use. Sigrun was the one who provided the answer:  
-Cats like the real Emil. If anyone here remembers this, it could be a way to expose the fake one if we ever need to.  
Hearing this, Helena instinctively turned her eyes in Sune's direction. Sune stared at his feet:  
-Håkan and Anna know. But not mom and dad. Can we at least wait until whenever you guys plan to stop hiding Emil before telling them the one they currently have isn't the real one? We were all quite sad when we thought he was dead. Eventually telling people you've be hiding him is part of your plan, right?  
Stig put his hand on Sune's shoulder:  
-It's a little complicated, unfortunately. He wants to avoid relying on his birthright too much to carve himself a new place in the world, so he is trying get as much as possible done without people knowing who he actually is. He'll eventually have to come out of hiding, but "when" is a question to which we don't quite have an answer yet.  
Helena saw how this could make sense. As far as the True Rulers were concerned, the ideal Royal was one who didn't try to have any real part in how the country was ruled and let themselves be spoiled rotten. In some places, ordinary citizens probably had more say in their everyday life than the Scandi Royals did. Helena's mind caught onto some of Stig's words:  
-What is Emil trying to do without his identity being known, exactly?

In the Royal Council room, "Vivian" finished reading the papers given to her by Tanja:  
-Looks like Tobias really did die doing some kind of experiment. Is there any way we can make that masquerade ball happen sooner?  
Randi was the one to answer:  
-It's already officially being held to celebrate the end of the mandatory mourning and suspicious death investigation time. We may lose the respect of many people if we hold it any earlier.  
She gave a nod to Kenneth, who took over:  
-And considering the true reason it's being held, a week is already a tight schedule for anyone living in foreign lands who wishes to apply.  
"Vivian" sneered:  
-Any foreigner worth putting in Tobias' old seat should already be here and have found a way to get into the party. Having it happen earlier will only keep the party from being submerged with inadequate candidates.  
The reply came from Harald, the councilor for money:  
-Many traders will lose money if the party happens any earlier _or_ any later than what is already planned. Those making the royal family's costumes have something special for "Prince Emil" that won't be ready before the day of the party, that was initially suggested to them by Tobias. Giving them the time to finish it properly would be a good way to honor his memory.  
Tanja's favorite activity, meanwhile, was to remind the others that it was never a good idea to break more laws than strictly necessary. Rolf, the councilor for nature, held towards the country's natural resources the same attitude that Harald held towards its money: the only thing worse than spending a lot on something he considered frivolous was said frivolous thing undergoing unnecessary changes that would result in it costing even more. "Vivian" responded to this like child who had just been told that they couldn't have a piece of cake:  
-Fine, it will happen in three days, in this case. Anything else?  
Randi was the one to break the news:  
-The King and Queen wish for Stig Hotakainen to attend the party with his husband to thank him for having served the family good tea at Princess Helena's initiative. I might as well also mention that they, the Prince and the Princess, all want to properly meet Princess Helena's "daughter" on the occasion. I'm guessing none of you want to take the risk of her applying for Tobias' old seat, even though she has shown absolutely no interest in it around me. I'm on good enough terms with her to carry out any precautions you may deem necessary in addition to her "daughter's" presence.  
With Tobias officially dead, "Vivian", being the only other mage on the Council, had had a good reason to be the one currently monitoring the surveillance spells that had been planted within "Janine". In contrast to the real Vivian who would have stayed professional about the subject, the mind currently controlling her body used it to express a delight that promptly gave Randi goosebumps:  
-Tobias must have had _something_ that kept her from doing magic while he had her in his room. I'll give his stuff a look and see if I can find it.  
Tobias had indeed owned such an item and "Vivian" wouldn't need to look for it for very long.

xxxx

Even with the chains removed, gold plating added and the locks replaced by mere clasps, there was no mistake as to what those "matching bracelets" had once been. And considering the nature of Tobias' own "application" for the counselor of magic position, the very idea of attending this masquerade ball with her powers out of use caused multiple alarm bells to ring in Helena's mind. Her nursemaid's idea of telling her a story that was both interesting and scary had been telling her about the ball during which Tobias's predecessor Niels had demonstrated his magical prowess. Her only consolation had been that Vivian had to endure their presence as well, as a reminder of what she had let happen for the sake of harming her position in the country's politics. Randi was still keeping Helena within her eyesight, as if having to watch "Janine" and carry her around wasn't already making discretely removing the bracelets unlikely enough. Sune was staying close to her because he was expected to. The circumstances had made Stig, Lalli and Sigrun slip into their body guard roles. This resulted in Helena having quite a crowd following her around, including when Sune's family got properly introduced to "Janine". Siv watched her eat her favorite meal, which happened to be among the snacks provided to the royal family:  
-She has good tastes. How did you figure out she likes these?  
Helena answered:  
-The first evening, the guys went out to buy everyone's favorite and Stig presented her with different things until she decided to eat something. I guess Vivian makes sure those kids are well-fed.  
Lalli, of all people, spoke:  
-If the green dress lady has an orphanage and the one with messy hair has a hospital, what did the dead guy have? And who's taking care of it if nobody is doing his work right now?  
Getting past _how_ Lalli asked a question to focus on _what_ he was asking was still a mental exercise to Helena's protocol-laden upbringing, but Stig had been right when telling her that it was the easiest way to see his good sides. Those who were quite new to this, one the other hand, all raised an eyebrow. Randi ended up being the one explaining:  
-He funded three free Inns for mages from the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders who wish to travel to Mora or the former capitals of the Western and Southern regions for study purposes. He also sponsored the travel of mages who wish to study in the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders. Well, he should have. As soon as he took his seat, he cut off everyone Niels was still sponsoring and told anyone who wanted to go back to their homeland that they better find a job to make the money and that by the way, he was looking for an assistant.  
That last part, Helena actually remembered. A very good friend of hers had been among those stranded on the giant iceberg during a study trip, and become suspiciously impossible to contact via the spirit realm soon after. Him getting thrown in jail with a sentence heavy enough to get his magical communication abilities sealed was the best-case scenario for his fate. As for the assistant thing, Helena guessed it hadn't gone that well, considering Tobias had been councilor of magic for less than a month when he had started spinning his web around her and Sune.

Helena's eyes drifted towards the fake Emil, whose wheeled chair had been outfitted to look like some sun god's chariot, while his costume was probably supposed to be the god in question. There was an actual line of mages trying to make him better, probably assuming that doing so would be a direct path to the open councilor position. The only reason they were not all trying at the same time was that clashing spells could do more harm than good. The current one was singing while drawing her custom talisman. There had been several attempts at combining Finmi magic with the one practiced in Scandi and the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders, and one of them had resulted in some mages singing whatever they considered appropriate while they made their talismans. Tobias hated it as part of his dismissal of Finmi magic as "primitive". The woman had disqualified herself without knowing it the second she had opened her mouth. In spite of the smiling face on the mask she was wearing, her general stance betrayed the moment her spell didn't do whatever she had been expecting it to do. The next in line was a man wearing a simple white mask on his face and his long sand-colored hair in a ponytail. He pressed a talisman he already had around his neck on the fake Emil's forehead, and promptly let out a "oh". Helena decided it might be worth watching what else he would do. If that "oh" meant that he had figured out that the "patient" wasn't even human, he might just make the cut. Unfortunately, he started singing as well, with a soft voice that sounded vaguely familiar. It wasn't an attempt to mimic Finmi spells, just a well-known lullaby that Helena remembered from her childhood. Listening to it as an adult, she couldn't help noticing that it seemed to promise the baby a present if it stopped making noise and to get better presents if the first wasn't satisfactory. Yet, it ended with the belief that even if something happened to the most impressive gift, the baby would still remain a nice person. She briefly doubted this was possible, but remembered Stig had hinted such a thing could have happened with Emil. This made her shift her attention to where Stig and Lalli had been standing a few moments ago, only to see they had vanished. Vivian yawned, and Sigrun discreetly signaled that she needed to talk to the rest of the group out of earshot of Sune's family.

They quickly found a quieter and less crowded place just outside the garden in which most of the guests were gathered. Helena got worried:  
-Did something happen?  
Sigrun sighed:  
-Stig overheated himself in that stupid costume he insisted on wearing and Lalli brought him back to the suite. I don't think I can properly keep an eye on all four of you in such big crowd alone, though I know neither you nor Lady Messyhair are completely helpless. I'd rather stand out here or go back to our room.  
Whatever had put Stig in a sour mood right after serving tea to the Royals, the prospect of a masquerade ball during which he was expected to wear a fancy costume he could put together from things the Royals had used in previous years had done a good job of cheering him up. He had gotten even more excited when Lalli had pointed out than dye that went away with the first wash – which was a problem with some of his current selection – would actually make a good alternative to a wig for a costume. Unfortunately, the costume emulating some fairy tale prince had otherwise been overambitious, and it had been impossible to convince him to do without anything that didn't obviously hinder his liberty of movement. Helena hoped he had learned his lesson. As for her…  
-I'd rather stay here. We all still have our eyes, ears and hands. Something may still happen tonight, and I'd rather be here than cooped up in our room if it happens. By the way Sigrun, could you clue me in as to why Stig was acting so gloomy after tea time the other day? I've tried to ask him several times, but he won't tell me. And something tells me I'm not going to get much out of Lalli if I try, either.

Lalli both hoped whoever was in charge of choosing the country's new "boss of all magic users" had noticed what had happened, and that they hadn't. Whatever spell that man had used, it had been so good at reaching its intended target that it had skipped over the magic-made Emil lookalike and managed to find its way to the real Emil. Someone good enough to make such a spell would definitely deserve the job if there were no other criteria – Lalli's experience was there were always some – but he had trouble seeing how a mage could notice what had happened without also getting a very good idea of where the real Emil currently was. For that matter, someone was already in the doorway between their bedroom and the main hall. Lalli turned around and activated his eye lights to find the white-masked and sandy-haired man who had cast the spell, still in in full costume. He raised his hand to signal that he intended to keep his distance:  
-Don't worry, I won't hurt him. But the situation concerning Prince Emil being still alive is obviously more complicated than I thought it was, so I'm not feeling comfortable leaving this room without knowing what's the deal with your friend and that elaborate puppet that the King and Queen are mistaking for their nephew.

Sigrun gave Helena an unusually stern look:  
-You mean you haven't figured it out yet? Don't take it the wrong way, I've been simply not dismissing the possibility that you had figured it out during the week and hadn't told any of us yet for some reason. But it has been a kind of crazy week for everyone, so I can't quite blame you if you haven't caught on yet either.  
Helena slumped on a nearby stone bench, soon imitated by Sune, reminded on the fact that adrenaline had been the only thing enabling her to keep up with the party:  
-If I say "no", will you just go ahead and tell me? Unless you want Vivian and Randi and to figure it out for themselves, as well.  
Randi shrugged as she went to sit next to Helena, on the side that wasn't already occupied by Sune:  
-I figured it out almost as soon as I found out your friends have been harboring the real Prince Emil. We had to consider what much poorer living conditions would do to a formerly well-off person while setting up the "discovery" of the fake one, so I knew what to look for.  
Helena was about to ask Randi what she meant, when her mind suddenly decided to serve her all the evidence she already had concerning the fact at the same time.

-Very interesting information indeed. I think there is something I can do for the two of you in return. I'll need you to lie on your left side, your Highness.  
Lalli watched as Emil, who was already lying down on the bed, complied. The masked man recited something that, this time, actually sounded like it could be a Finmi spell sung in Scandi, that seemed to call for purified earth being taken out of flesh. Emil suddenly sat up, and promptly stared at the pillow, on which there was now an irregular silver cylinder no bigger than the width of the nail on Lalli's smallest finger. The masked man spoke:  
-This used to be an extremely small talisman. It's been in there ever since you were an infant. Only the wisdom councilor is supposed to know they are in there and use them if they consider it's needed. In reality, magic councilors that hold their job long enough tend to eventually find out about them as well. They make the term "Puppet Royal" a little more literal than it should be.  
As Lalli was trying to figure out what the man meant while keeping his eye out for any suspicious moves on his part, Emil got his eyes off the pillow to speak:  
-What do you mean by "they"?  
-The ones inside the rest of your family, of course. Though the one inside one of your cousins seems to have been but put out of use in some very crude way. I think I have just made the exchange of favors fair. Goodbye, and good luck with whatever brought you here.  
The man left, and Emil slumped right back onto the bed. Lalli rushed to see if he was alright, as the effects of the man's initial spell hitting him had been way too easy to pass off as overheating to people who had seen him collapse. A quick physical examination fortunately indicated that it was mostly mood-induced:  
-What's wrong?  
-I don't know if it's good idea anymore. The more we stay here, the more I'm reminded of what those guys can do if they see any of us as a threat. And I'm not going to be able to do this without eventually becoming a threat to at least one of them.  
-You can still become a good merchant. Like that, if you change your mind again, at least you'll have a better chance of being chosen to replace one of them than now. You can sleep, if you want. I'll watch.

The cycle of connecting dots and finding yet more to connect in which Helena's mind had engaged was interrupted by the sound of fireworks. They were part of the party's plan, but Randi had recently informed all of them that the moment they were actually started meant that someone had been chosen. Randi spoke over them:  
-We should maybe get a little closer. Vivian and I could use seeing whether it's a familiar face or not.  
The garden was soon packed, facing a balcony that "Vivian" hadn't left during the entire party. If she hadn't been tasked with being an extra pair of eyes and currently avoiding her outside of professional circumstances, Randi would have been up there, as well. While Helena now felt foolish for not having realized that Stig and the real Emil were one and the same earlier, she had caught onto the fact that Tobias had arranged for the fire from three years ago to start in the _archives_. That meant that there was now nothing to consult, at least in the palace itself, to check out her suspicion that "Tobias" was far from the first name to which that mind had answered. Because of this, she currently hesitated to use even that name. And since the last thing she needed was to add fuel to the fire of those who already thought she was mentally ill in some way, right now she felt like calling that mind by the name they were using in public, just as she was calling the child "Janine" in spite of who was really inside her. Next to "Vivian" was the sandy-haired man in the white mask that she had seen earlier. The usual introduction happened, which ended with the new councilor revealing their face and stating their name. Helena's jaw dropped, alongside that of a decent portion of the rest of the assembly.  
-Daniel.  
-Hum… Didn't we Ice Floe that guy a few years ago?  
Randi was the one who had just spoken. The "giant iceberg" nickname of the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders, combined with the reputation some northern regions had for casting off the undesirable members of their communities on ice floes, had given birth to an euphemism for getting rid of someone by making them move to the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders. She now knew why the voice had sounded familiar, and dwelled on the fact that she hadn't immediately recognized it a little more than what was probably reasonable. She was also a little angry at him for not having told her he was back. She had been worried when he had first gone missing, but several factors, including the giant iceberg's very strict border policy that made it impossible for people of high rank to discreetly enter or leave, had kept her from properly investigating his disappearance.  
-Randi, what's the penalty for slapping a member of the Royal Council already?  
-I'm not sure, you'd need to ask Tanja. Though she sometimes looks the other way if it's someone who knows us personally and the reason for the slapping happened in her presence.  
The position in which Randi was standing in regards to Helena enabled Helena to notice Randi passing her hand on the shoulder that had been the most affected by the whiplashes. Helena guessed that temptation to slap "Vivian" was itching her quite badly. Unfortunately, Helena knew the mind that was in there to be really good at playing the victim, due to apparently being unable to tell the difference between fair retribution for a wrongdoing and a completely unwarranted personal attack. With the only witnesses of the wounds being Helena and people who were friends with her, her best option remained to avoid any non-professional interaction with "Vivian" along with any situation in which they were the only two people in the room. If that slap happened, Randi would be the one who had "suddenly started acting aggressive" in the eyes of many. This, in itself, was a common problem with settling something that had happened in a room's privacy while outside of it; as far as people who weren't there were concerned, whether the object of the retribution had actually happened or not ultimately came down to personal preconceptions and sympathies. Helena grumbled at the realization that the reason she considered herself entitled to Daniel's latest news in the first place was technically a "room's privacy" issue as well, if one associated with quite pleasant memories. Or rather, memories that had been quite pleasant until "Tobias" had ruined them.


	5. Memories

**Note:** My brain kept firing various ideas for flash-backs and alternate perspectives with no "present-day" set-up, so I just let this chapter become a collection of vignettes.

 **Memories**

– Daniel I –

-This place is both a school and a prison. To graduate, you have to escape.

– Helena I –

Sune was too young to realize that Helena was seeking a dance partner with whom she could do a little more than dancing once the party would be over, but it had still been sweet of him to offer. As Sune was seeming in a somber mood, the least she could do was to ask about it:  
-What's wrong?  
-Håkan and Anna both already have three councilors who want them as the future heir. Tobias is the only one who hasn't chosen yet, and it's probably because he's too new to know much about us.  
-I admit it's not looking very good for you. For what it's worth, _I_ think you would make a great King. And nothing is lost for you quite yet. The definitive choice will be made when all three of you turn fifteen, so proper sixteenth birthday arrangements can be made for all of you. There are still five years left. Also, the Council may be influential, but there are other high-ranking people whose opinions are valued. If enough of them like you by then, you may have a chance.  
Her words were truthful, both concerning her support of Sune and his prospects. Sune raised an eyebrow at her words:  
-Who would that be?  
-Me, for instance. But I must warn you. You better really want the throne, because your siblings are going to be fighting for their respective claims, as well. Or rather, their supporters will be doing it in their names.  
Sune nervously swallowed before answering:  
-I think I want to try. Will you help me?  
Helena shrugged:  
-Looks like I better put acts where my mouth is. But I better warn you: if Håkan ends up becoming the heir, I am probably going to end up betrothed to him. However, for now, just be aware it's never too early to look for more people.  
The part where dancers had to change partners came, and Helena scanned the room for someone she could sweet talk into either doing more than dancing or supporting Sune. A person she could convince into one of those things after drawing them in with the other wouldn't be bad, either. Someone else ended up grabbing her hand. Next thing she knew, she was dancing with Tobias, who looked like either a man in his early forties who was aging _very_ well or someone younger whose face had been prematurely worn out by hard work:  
-I happen to have overheard your discussion with Prince Sune. I thought that you might be interested in the fact that the reason I have yet to choose between Prince Håkan and Princess Anna is that my mind is currently leaning toward Prince Sune. Would you mind explaining me your reasons for favoring him?  
As far as Helena was concerned, it was this man's fault that Daniel was stuck on the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders and unreachable. Unfortunately, Daniel's trade-off for having much more liberty than Emil's "toy" would have had was the complete lack of any official status in regards to Helena; even the beginning of a friendship they officially had didn't warrant her investigating his disappearance beyond asking others whether they happened to be aware of his whereabouts. Besides, this was the "beggars can't be choosers" phase of gathering allies. If Tobias turned out to be problematic for other reasons, she would probably find a way to kick him out of the circle of Sune's supporters at a later point.

– Emil I –

-And after the lady gets her window fixed, people refuse to believe someone broke it. So, she asks her friend if she should have kept it broken so people would believe her. The end.  
The end of the short presentation prompted Emil to at the short story in Finmi language that he had been asked to read the previous evening, then explain to his teacher in Scandi language at the end of this morning's class. Unfortunately, it still looked like gibberish. He was going to be next, as he was the only other student in the room. Ylva spoke:  
-Very good, Alva. Stig?  
Someone had suggested that learning alongside someone else of a similar level might motivate him. It clearly wasn't working. He sighed:  
-I'm sorry, but I don't seem to be able to read it.  
A voice piped up from the windowsill:  
-You and girl, getting same story. Stupid.  
Emil took a few moments to realize that not only Lalli had spoken Scandi language, but he would have had to understand what Alva had just said to be able to make such a statement. As Emil was retrieving a memory of Lalli looking at the book containing the story at some point the previous evening, Ylva came closer to the window on the sill of which Lalli had been seemingly having a nap:  
-Very good, Lalli. I was hoping he would at least pick up on that. It looks like you did learn a few things from your stay in Scandi, after all. I hate having to be so blunt, but considering the progress your friend has been making, it may actually be faster for me to teach you how to speak Scandi properly. What do you think?  
-No!  
Lalli jumped out of the window and landed on the street below. Emil rushed towards the room's actual door:  
-Hey! Wait for me! Bye Ylva, bye Alva!  
As he made it out of the house, Emil thought that he should have learned that Lalli could both pull those stunts and wait for him by now. He couldn't help noticing that he felt a little less winded than last time something similar had happened:  
-Since when do you speak Scandi? I remember Tuuri once mentioned trying to teach you and failing.  
-Tuuri's way. Not working. Listening your Finmi classes. Working. Not knowing why.  
-Well, at least one of us is learning something from those classes. 

– Helena II –

Tobias was surprisingly good company. His ideas about magic were similar enough to hers that they had plenty of pleasant discussion material, yet diverged just enough that they could use each other to perfect their respective arguments. Part of her was even starting to wonder if he was any good in bed. Fortunately, Daniel's disappearance was fresh enough in her mind to keep any idea of actually asking him at bay. She was very grateful for that when she suddenly realized the probable reason the tea Tobias had just served her was tasting a little strange. She ran to the room's door, only to find it locked. With a type of magic to which she had mentioned paying little-to-no attention to Tobias. Her legs suddenly became too weak to support her, yet restless.  
-You don't seem well, Princess. How about you lie down?  
The bed had always been the only somewhat comfortable seat in Tobias' secret workroom. She now knew it wasn't only there because of the long hours he spent in there.

– Lalli –

Most people around Lalli spoke Finmi, and his Scandi was now good enough for him to understand many of the words spoken by those using that language. Despite this, he had already found himself pulling Taru, Onni or Cecilia aside to have them explain something he hadn't understood from a previous conversation. Each of their answers had relied on somehow guessing what amount of truth or lies there had been in other people's words, as if it were natural to them. His awareness of what was _really_ going on between various people somehow felt not that much better than when he had lived in the palace where almost everyone spoke a language other than Finmi. There had been a few other Finmi speakers there, but he had only interacted with them during the even fewer times he had been involved in a major misunderstanding while Tuuri wasn't around and _really_ couldn't be interrupted. Remembering this made him briefly wonder if he _really_ needed to be part of those conversations, only to remember that Taru had become head of the household because both his parents and Onni's had died in addition to grandma disappearing. He had half the number of people Taru had had before her in the line of succession, and they didn't have any children yet. His awareness of this had made him try participating in one of those conversations with someone who looked important to be on good terms with, but the man had become angry and yelled at him for a reason he could not comprehend. Upon realizing what he had done, he had run away to sit in a calmer place, away from the party. Onni had turned out to have followed him there, and only confirmed that he had told the wrong words to the wrong person. He had suggested to Lalli that he figure out a way to avoid making such a mistake again, before going back to the gathering. This brought Lalli back to the present time, and his complete lack of ideas to avoid doing something similar again.

-Hey, Lalli, guess who's going to be apprenticed to the tea seller in a few months!  
A very enthusiastic Emil came to sit next to Lalli.  
-Someone I know? I don't care otherwise.  
Emil ruffled his hair, that was currently dyed in a dark brown color that Lalli quite liked:  
-Ah, that's right. Let me rephrase that: I'll be apprenticing with the tea seller as soon as he'll done with his current apprentice. Hey, what's wrong?  
-I made an important person angry. I don't know why.  
-Don't worry about that. I know people who get angry at the absence of one very small thing when they talk to people. Many of those things are things you never do while speaking to anyone, so you're bound to make people like that angry because they'll always think you're doing it to them specifically.  
-What should I be doing, then?  
-Actually looking at people's face when you speak to them would be a good start.  
-But I don't like doing it. It feels weird.  
-I see where there would be a problem, then.  
Emil sat by his side for a few moments, then suddenly stood up spoke:  
-Hey, I have an idea. Stand up and face me.  
Lalli did as Emil told him.  
-Now look at my face. Now look at spot that is a little higher than my face. Just high enough that it doesn't bother you anymore. Do the same thing for a spot to the right to my face. Then to the left. Then under it. Ah, that's what I thought.  
Lalli sighed:  
-Why did you make me do this?  
-I think you may be able to make people think you are looking at their face when you actually aren't. Like that, they would be happy and you wouldn't feel too weird. Do you want to go try it now or wait a little?  
This was an easy question to answer:  
-Wait.  
Both of them sat down again. Lalli realized he had forgotten to tell Emil something:  
-Congratulations for your apprenticeship.  
For some reason, Emil seemed to be more happy hearing this than telling him the news:  
-Thank you.

– Helena III –

Helena now knew she wasn't dreaming. Sune had been avoiding her for the past few days. She soon realized it wasn't only her, but also his parents and siblings. He was eventually avoiding so many people that Helena couldn't help notice who was the one person he was _not_ avoiding: Tobias. She had decided to burn as many bridges with Tobias as she could while still being a regular visitor at the palace after he had put a "love pill" in her tea, then taken advantage of the consequences. Formal prosecution would be his word against hers, but there were others ways she could make him pay the price of his actions. One of them was to refuse to associate with him ever again, something that she had seen other people do to each other for much more shallow reasons. Another had been telling Sune to no longer listen to a single word he said. The exact opposite had been very obviously happening. For all she knew, Sune's current behavior could all be a trap meant to get her back into Tobias' secret workroom. But she could also see that if she avoided it, she would be letting Tobias continue whatever he was doing to Sune.

– Onni –

Another party was going to happen soon. It would be Lalli's chance to fix the mistake he had made at the previous one. Onni was quite sure this was the reason Lalli was currently impossible to find, despite the fact that he was quite certain he was still somewhere on the island. He heard Reynir call him:  
-I found him. He's with "Stig" and they're speaking in Scandi language, so I'm not quite sure whether they can be interrupted or not.  
Onni was of a generation who was making a point of not learning to speak Scandi language, and only using the Shared Tongue to speak with those who didn't have Finmi as a native language. Their household harboring a Scandi Prince who hadn't been able to learn any language besides his own in spite of his father's best efforts to give him an incentive to do so had been quite a challenge to that ideal. Even before "Stig's" arrival, it had been impossible for Onni to not passively pick up a little Scandi. However, his level had only so far prevented him from being tricked by people who assumed he didn't speak Scandi at all a handful of times, and his long-term objective could still be fulfilled by refusing to have a conversation in the language unless strictly necessary. Between Tuuri having been insatiable in terms of knowledge and Lalli simply wanting to be able to speak with the one person in his life who could more or less be called a friend, Onni hadn't had the heart to discourage his younger family members from learning it for themselves.

Reynir led Onni to a small cave near the edge of the island, where he could hear the two talking.  
-Do you see how what you just said could make someone angry?  
-Hmm… no?  
-When you ask someone if they couldn't do something because doing it requires a certain quality, it's almost the same thing as outright telling them that you think they don't have that quality. And you know it's something people don't like to hear.  
Lalli lets out a sigh in response:  
-This is so weird! How do other people spend all their time talking like this? How am I not going to make a mistake and make everyone else angry at me again?  
-I can't completely keep you from making mistakes, only help you make fewer than last time. And even I don't know how to keep absolutely everyone from getting angry at me during a conversation.  
-What are you talking about? Taru says you're quite okay to talk with when you remember that not everything is about you.  
-If I met someone who was kind of like you, but got angry more easily, I'm not sure my best possible politeness would help very much. They would probably want me to speak in a more straightforward way, but I'm not sure I would be able to figure that out before I made them angry.  
-Would you really do it? Speak more directly to someone if you realized it was what they wanted?  
-Yes.  
-Then why am I the one who needs to learn to speak weird when other people could just not do it?  
Silence fell for a few moments, during which Onni found himself thinking about the question. His thoughts were interrupted by "Stig" answering Lalli:  
-I don't know. I guess that this is how almost everybody has their conversations, and it's easier to get angry at the few who don't do things that way because it doesn't come to them easily, than to change the way to do things for just a few people. Hey, we should probably go back home and get you rested.  
Onni got himself as far away from the cave as he could as fast as he could, dragging a bemused Reynir along. He needed a little time to think before he spoke with Lalli again, and it was going to be a little hard to do if he realized Onni had just been listening to this conversation.

– Sune I –

Sune felt so stupid. Tobias had genuinely convinced him that the entire rest of the court was out to either kill him or do something bad to him, and that his secret workroom was the only place where he was truly safe. Sune wasn't sure what had happened over the last hour or two. Only that Helena was now hugging him and crying, and that her arms currently felt like the safest place in the entire room. Tobias, who had apparently been silently watching them all this time, spoke:  
-If you are done sobbing yet, I'd like your help with something else.  
Helena stopped crying, but held Sune much tighter against her:  
-You have a _really_ twisted ways of asking for help. The answer is no.  
Sune suddenly found himself wrestling out of Helena's arms, walking away from the bed, and taking a dagger given to him by Tobias, all against his own will. Next thing he knew, he was pointing the dagger towards his own throat. Tobias spoke:  
-Would you mind reconsidering your answer?

– Taru –

-I'm not sure I see what the problem is. You seem to have done your bookkeeping quite well.  
"Stig" ruffled his hair:  
-Why is there so little money left over? I thought merchants were supposed to be rich or something. I can barely afford to buy food for myself with that.  
Taru hadn't gotten such a reminder of his true identity quite a while:  
-Consider yourself lucky that you already make enough to live off your work. Your other solutions are to sell more items, make getting your current merchandise cheaper or sell something for which people are ready to pay a lot more money than you did. You figure out which one works best for you.  
"Stig" let out a resigned sigh:  
-Thanks for helping… again. Hey, what are all those letters?  
Taru turned her attention back to the various papers on her desk:  
-Eighteen is the age at which people can start getting married around here. Lalli is getting close enough that members of other small island ruling families are starting to show their interest. Actually, this reminds me, we should figure out what to do about you, as well.  
-Are you sure it's such a good idea? What would happen if I get married here, have a child or two, and then get discovered by the wrong people? It feels wrong to put that kind of burden on someone who thinks they're just marrying some poor backwoods merchant.  
Taru patted his shoulder:  
-Don't worry. It may surprise to you given how remote this place may seem to you, but you _can_ marry a man here, if you wish. If anything, it will make not having any children a little easier. A couple of those letters are from the parents or guardians of young men, actually.  
"Stig" went back to sit at the small table in Taru's study at which he had been working:  
-Could you please find someone good for Lalli? You owe him that after what you were willing to let happen to him when he was sixteen.  
Taru let out a sigh:  
-I'll do my best, but I will still have to consider the family's overall interests above all. At the time, letting you have him looked like a better move than refusing.  
Taru found herself wondering how she was going to convince anyone that "Stig" would make a good match, since secretly being the officially-dead Prince of Scandi and the long-term goal this fact was fueling remained his best assets. Plenty of small, but profit-making businesses had gone under due to their owner's "new great idea for making more money". "Stig" was unfortunately one of the people she trusted the least to not make such a mistake. He, however, did have a point about his future spouse potentially getting into trouble they never asked for if the wrong people discovered his survival. It was too bad that Tyra was already married, and Johan both too young and clearly interested in women, considering Adam and Ylva were the only other people who knew of "Stig's" real identity among the nearby island ruling families. Taru started reading a randomly chosen letter, and the scenario under which things could go wrong with that particular suitor quickly shaped in her mind. She realized that it may be a good idea to ask "Stig" to teach Lalli to… when the idea came, she almost gave herself a slap on the forehead for not having it earlier.

– Emil II –

There they were again. The room was about the same size as last time, but held a bigger number of smaller and less comfortable beds. The biggest difference remained his perception of Lalli, which had moved from an adult-sized child who probably had no idea of what was going on to a man who understood what was going on in a way that was different from most. The past week had been hectic enough that Emil's mind had completely gone blank on the fact that there was going to be a "wedding night" until the two of them were left alone in the house's only bedroom. The main purpose of the wedding party was to keep the room's other usual occupants out of it for the rest of the night. Both the door and the windows were also being guarded so neither of them could leave during the night. According to Taru, forcing the new spouses to talk to each other or sleep next to each other even if they didn't feel like doing the expected thing was the entire purpose of the arrangement. Going through the entire ceremony without any kind of break had exhausted Lalli, so he had fallen asleep as soon as he had shed off all the layers of clothing that couldn't double as sleepwear. Since "shedding" had been a far too appropriate term for what Lalli had done with the clothes, Emil had decided to properly put them away, noticed how little he could move in his own wedding garb, and ended up removing as much as Lalli had. After that, the combination of not feeling tired quite yet and wanting to be near Lalli had resulted in him sitting cross-legged on the free half of the two-person bed and watching Lalli sleep.

His thoughts ended up drifting towards Helena, and wondering what she was up to, now that she was no longer his betrothed. He also realized how self-centered his attempts to act friendly towards her had been, and why she had stopped responding to them after the first handful. Hopefully, her future or current spouse treated her better than he had. His thoughts next drifted towards all the tasks he now did without a second thought, and that he would have utterly refused to get his hands dirty with when he was still living in the palace. How each time he had done a new thing, sometimes committing to doing it on a regular basis in the process, it had been because it helped Lalli rather than him. And how Lalli always seemed to make sure Emil took care of himself more often than he watched out for his own well-being. It suddenly dawned on him that Taru had probably decided to marry them in part because she had doubts about their capacity to function without each other. However, he found himself unable to actually get angry at her. This entire household, at the end of the day, had helped him a lot when it would have had every right to consider he wasn't worth its trouble. He hoped he would be able to pay them back in some way, some day.

The combination of the night getting closer to its colder part and the smaller number of layers he was wearing caught up with him, and he decided to slip under the blanket to make himself warmer without disturbing Lalli. Next thing he knew, a still-asleep Lalli was snuggling against him, and he was having the hardest time finding a reason to not simply let it happen.

– Sune II –

-Sune, listen to me. I think I know how Tobias can make your body move the way he wants. I figured out how to make it stop, but it's going to hurt the inside of your left ear very badly. I will only do it if you say "Yes". If you do, choose a time where you will be ready to run away from here.

– Helena IV –

Sune and Alva were playing with fallen tree branches as if they were swords, and Sigrun was half-mockingly, half-seriously complaining about them having apparently forgotten what she taught them earlier in the day. The sight was the only thing that bought anything approaching a glimmer of joy to Helena. She'd better get used to that bench in Adam and Ylva's garden. Being officially under house arrest, if one Ylva had no desire to enforce too strictly, had been essential for even the inhabitants of the "Scandi neighborhood" to accept having her on the island. The Finmi portion of the population, meanwhile, was ready to drive her out of their own streets by force if she set foot in them. Where could she go on the one street on which she would be tolerated? If she went to any of the few businesses it held alone, she would probably end up spending a week's worth of the small allowance Adam gave her in a day. This was less than desirable in the conditions under which Adam was letting her stay, one of which was that if she had any plan to live outside of the means of that allowance, she'd need to find a job. A job that very few people would be willing to give her. Tyra's workplace had looked interesting, but Tyra had refused to believe the real story due to the current state of her body lining up with the official story much better. Helena had never thought that teaching herself to heal those injuries to ease her own suffering and Sune's would backfire so badly once they managed to escape. Sune had already been refused a few age-appropriate odd jobs, under the pretense that any money given to him might as well be given to Helena.

-Hum… hi?  
A man with dark brown chin-length hair and full beard just long enough to conceal the real shape of his face was in the garden holding a basket. Helena answered to him:  
-Hi.  
Sigrun ran up to the man, who happened to be shorter than her, and gave him a friendly shoulder slap:  
-Stig! It's been a while! Still under the delusion you can make something drinkable out of stuff used for decoration?  
Stig started picking leaves from a nearby bush, carefully examining each of them before putting them in his basket:  
-I won't know unless I try. By the way, is that…  
Stig showed Helena with his chin. Sigrun was the one who answered:  
-Yes. And Sune is over here.  
Stig stopped his harvesting to watch the children play, for a time that quickly started to seem a little long to Helena.  
-May I know what you are looking at, sir?  
Stig ruffled his hair:  
-Ah, sorry about this. I kind of see why you wouldn't want strangers staring at him for too long. It's just that I heard what happened to both of you from Sigrun and I'm happy to see he has something to take his mind off it. It's something good to have. I hope you have something like that for yourself, as well.  
Helena let herself raise an eyebrow:  
-You actually believe my version of the story?  
The man's demeanor suddenly became quite stern:  
-The fire those guys started three years ago to kill Prince Emil killed my parents also. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you were the next person they wanted to get rid of. I'm willing to believe they tried to hurt you in some way, then started claiming you are the one who is trying to hurt people when it didn't work.  
The world _was_ small, after all. Unfortunately, she couldn't let her guard down:  
-So, what did you your parents do in the palace?  
-I'm not really sure. Our family had a house in town before they were hired to work in the palace, and they thought it was best that I didn't know what they did so other people wouldn't try taking advantage of it through me. But they also told me I should leave Scandi if a certain number of things happened. I attached myself to a group of people who were also running away when the fire happened. One of them has relatives around here.  
-What do you do around here?  
-I sell tea and hair dye at the market. Maybe you could come… ah, right, it's off-limits to you. Well, I mostly hang around the neighborhood when I'm not working, so I guess I can sell you something then.  
-Thanks for the offer.  
They continued talking about various things as Stig harvested leaves until his basket was full:  
-Sorry, I need to go home and prepare these now. Hey, how about we continue this chat at the Scandi tavern in front of a drink one of those days? Whenever you feel like doing it.  
Sigrun chimed in:  
-You should go, he's good company. Just don't keep him out too late into the night, or his husband may not like it too much.  
This was very far away from how Helena expected her first invitation for a drink while staying at Adam's house to go. Her gut had a surprisingly good feeling about the idea, so she might as well give it a shot.

– Daniel II –

This had not been the plan. Niels himself had told him that getting signing involved in the practice of magic was looked down upon by the upper crust of Scandi mages, and that using songs during the application for the councilor of magic or councilor of wisdom positions was an immediate disqualifier. However, it had been impossible for Daniel to stay indifferent to the news of the state in which Helena's should-have-been husband had been found. Emil was, however, still a member of the Royal Family, which forbade random strangers from approaching him. When Daniel had heard of Tobias dying as soon as he had set foot in Scandi for the first time in three years, he had seen the perfect way to help Emil without actually applying for the councilor position: use the spell he had in mind, but have it contained in a song to keep himself from being chosen. Daniel's plan had been to temporarily disrupt the body-control talisman inside Emil, as he was suspecting that it was being used to make him _look like_ he was in a semi-catatonic state. Under that assumption, breaking the connection between the talisman and whoever was using it would briefly give the illusion Emil had recovered. If Daniel turned out to be wrong, and that Emil was genuinely in such a state, briefly taking control of the talisman himself could be used for the purposes of a similar solution. But Daniel hadn't expected to find the body-control talisman to be completely absent upon the use of his medical check-up spell. The Emil present at the party not only being a fake, but not even a naturally-born human being, had been quite a surprise, as well. He had however decided to continue his attempt as if he hadn't made the discovery; he had enough worry about who was actually in charge of the country to consider that someone good enough to become the councilor for magic should be able to notice that they were losing their time trying to "cure" the fake Emil on their own. Little had Daniel known that the biggest shock of the evening had yet to come. Still using the spell meant to target Emil had seemed to be a good way to confuse any onlooker aware of the masquerade into believing _he_ thought he was dealing with the real Emil. The real Emil had turned out to be _much_ closer than expected, namely among Helena's entourage. As the real Emil had been perfectly healthy and his body-control talisman inactive, the spell had knocked him out instead. Daniel had immediately realized his mistake, but also that the real Emil was currently in the position of both having nothing obvious indicating that he was a Royal and a body-control talisman inside him. He was lucky to have not have ended up with the kind of people who would readily take advantage of that combination of circumstances, as far as Daniel could tell.

He decided to find where Tuuri's cousin had taken Emil, and help him out by getting him rid of the talisman. The idea that Vivian could still take control of him after having been completely fine with having him dead didn't sit well with Daniel. He had also quickly decided to pass for a random stranger interested in exchanging information and favors, rather than "I would have probably been the actual father of at least one of your kids if Helena had married you. Don't tell her I'm here, she'll probably murder me if she finds out. Bye.". That plan had worked surprisingly well, considering the glitches in his previous ones. But that had turned out to be all the luck he had been allotted for the evening. On his way out, he hadn't been able to resist seeing if the very trick that had gotten him past the guards would let him walk behind Vivian without being noticed by her, as well. He would have probably gotten away with moving _past_ her at a fast walker's pace. Unfortunately, the mere presence of her secure area in the "layer" of the spirit realm summoned by that "invisibility" trick had been unexpected enough to literally stop Daniel on his tracks. "Vivian" has next grabbed his arm and congratulated him for graduating so quickly. As the spirit realm was fading from Daniel's eyes and he was becoming visible to all eyes again, "Vivian" had both bad news and good news for him. The bad news was that she couldn't let someone with his ability run around the kingdom and that she now needed to keep him where she could keep an eye on him. The good news was that the "best spot from which to be watched" happened to be available. "Vivian" promptly called for the fireworks to be started.


	6. The market of the dead

**Note:** Thanks to all the people who helped me avoid slip-ups in Markus' scenes!

 **The market of the dead**

-I'm really curious of what ever gave you the idea that we were _not_ going to leave as soon as a new councilor for magic was chosen.  
-I was hoping you would have enough brains and morals to _not_ take the most powerful person in the country away from the capital. I will have a hard time holding her ground for her if she's not here.  
As far as Sigrun was concerned, Helena and Randi had ben throwing variations at the same argument at each other for the last ten minutes, and both had yet to find the variation that would make the other budge. Helena had every reason to not want to stay in the palace any longer than strictly necessary, and couldn't leave without the girl who was her daughter as far as all but a select few were concerned. Randi had equally good reasons to not want the mind of the woman who was both her lover and one of the people really running the country to leave both the palace and the capital. Sigrun glanced into Emil and Lalli's room from the door between the suite's two rooms, thinking of the fact that Lalli occasionally had interesting insights, but tended to be less willing to care about disputes the closer they got to mutual shouting.  
-Maybe we should stay. Definitely not in the palace, but maybe somewhere in Mora or its outskirts.  
Sune's unexpected words at least had the merit of interrupting the argument. Helena turned towards Sune and crossed her arms:  
-And what would we gain in doing that?  
-We don't know what to do with "Janine" because wherever we take her, "Vivian" will be able to watch and listen to us and any caretaker we leave her with. We'll look like bad parents if we have her fostered with anyone "Vivian" would not want to keep an eye on. But she's not doing much harm if she stays in Mora. All the councilors have their largest number of spies in the capital, so an extra spy in the capital won't see many things that the others haven't already.  
Sigrun swore she briefly saw a smile on Helena's face:  
-Fine, let's say you, me and "Janine" stay here. Sigrun and Lalli probably want to get out of here with "Stig" in case Randi isn't the only one who figured out who he is on his own. With all their stories running around about us, we may have trouble finding a welcoming neighborhood outside of the palace.  
Sigrun suddenly realized that just leaving the palace could actually work for them as well:  
-We'll need to wait for "Stig" to wake up to see if he agrees. But I know he already told you he and Lalli have plans to move back to Scandi eventually. The three of us mostly came here to keep an eye on the two of you and find out more about a certain rumor that didn't quite make sense to us, but it would save us a lot of future effort if we just didn't come back from this trip. But you better be serious about the "not in the palace" part. That thing that bunch of nobles and merchants is passing off as Emil has been freaking him out, and he could definitely use seeing it a little less often. The only downside is that I don't have much of an idea of where we could go.

Daniel literally appeared out of thin air, holding "Janine":  
-I performed all the tests I could think of. I unfortunately can't see an easy way to reverse the process either. Randi, the mansion is empty except for a housekeeper. I thought you guys would have found someone to give it to by now.  
Randi finally let go of the victorious expression that had been gradually forming on her face ever since Sune had suggested to stay:  
-Honestly, we all knew it would be unwise on our part to assume that the Wonder School would hold you for very long. We also assumed you wouldn't be very happy with what you found if you ever made it back here. Tobias had no interest in it, so we kept it aside as a ready-to-deliver peace offering. I guess it's as good a time as any to remind you that if you desire to get the mansion filled up again and lack the acquaintances to do so, it is my responsibility and that of the other members of the Council to provide you with any personnel you desire to have.  
Daniel gave Randi quite the death glare as he handed "Janine" to Helena:  
-I think I'm going to go with hiring my personnel myself. I may have slightly less of a chance of ending up with people who are actually spies working for you or the others.  
Randi sighed:  
-I had your mindset when I started out, but I have personally found that incompetent employees are more of a problem than employees who are actually spies when it comes to their job's day-to-day requirements. You just need to avoid getting too friendly with any of them. If they work for the other members of the Council, at least you know _who_ they are working for. People picked up off the street are more of a gamble. If you have any idea where to find at least half a dozen competent people both willing to work for you and unlikely to turn on you, when Helena is the closest thing you have to an actual friend among the upper crust, I wish you luck.  
"Janine's" reaction to that last sentence was as much as a chuckle as she could manage while being unable to speak.

xxxx

Randi had gone back to her own quarters and everyone else besides Helena and Daniel was asleep. In Sune's case, this was enabled only by Helena sitting on the bed right next to him. Helena spoke:  
-This is as alone as we are going to get, barring any ears in the walls. Now, that explanation you promised me.  
Daniel took a deep breath before answering:  
-You know how we were always taught that the spirit realm has two layers occupied by living people. One for mages, one for none-mages. And how it takes a while to figure out how to move from one to the other.  
-Yes.  
-There is actually a third one, that overlaps with the physical world in a way nobody quite understands. Once one has figured out how to go there while awake, it's quite easy to go back and forth. Someone hiding in that layer might as well be a ghost when in comes to their interactions with the physical world. There are a couple catches, though. One is that is becomes the more likely to temporarily kick people out in some way the longer they choose to stay, and resisting the phenomenon drains a lot of power. The other is that it that one's spirit realm safe area ends up there. Nobody has figured out how to move from that layer to the better-known ones, be it while awake or in their sleep, yet. The ability to move to that extra layer was used during _that_ war. The Finmi mages never knew what hit them. Once the war was over, many people in high places didn't like the idea of too many people being able to use that ability, so its practice in most magic schools teaching Isle style magic was outlawed forty years ago. There is one place still teaching it legally on the Grand Isle of Icy Wonders, officially for the sake of knowledge preservation. It's a good magic school in its own right, and the place to go to make the most of a permission to have a long visit on the Isle. However, they are still against "wrong" uses of that ability, and will only teach it to people fulfilling an odd set of criteria. But if they consider someone qualifies, they don't give them much choice about it and get them locked up in a special wing of the school they can only ever leave by learning how to use the ability. The place has Moon marble walls much like the Isle's prisons, so contact with mages outside the building is impossible whether one has figured out how to use the ability or not. More mundane forms of contact with the outside are prevented, as well. That wing has living units for families.  
Helena had to take a few moments to process the information before finding something to say:  
-I'm not surprised you got yourself out of there in only a few years. I may need to sleep on the rest of this before deciding what I think of it, and get rid of that impulse to slap you and a few other people. Is there any information you need from me? I know I have… taken you for granted at times, so you're probably of two minds about some of the things you have heard.  
-You had you own way of taking me for granted, and it didn't match any of the stories I was hearing. You also happened to be within my eyesight and earshot a few times while I was covertly scouting for my plans to enter and exit the masquerade ball. Your attitude about… bedroom activities is very different from the one you used to have, and I didn't see many things that would make it change in such a way. Actually, I have a question about this, if you don't mind.  
-Go ahead, but no more than one for tonight.  
-You remember how we managed to still "see" each other, even from very far away?  
Helena nodded. The fact that they had presences much like their own bodies in the spirit realm had resulted in quite a few interesting options.  
-Did Tobias ever "visit" you there?  
-No, and it was one of the few upsides of the whole thing. Sorry, but now I really need to…  
Just as she yawned, her brain put Daniel's question and his reasons for lack of contact together:  
-Are you thinking it could be because Tobias can do the same thing as you?  
-I'm not thinking it. The soul that currently inhabits Vivian's body has its secure area in the same layer of the spirit realm as mine.

Helena walked on the water-like floor of the spirit realm until she found an extremely small safe area right below its surface, just big enough to contain the spiritual "body" of an adult woman. She hadn't given it much thought before, as it had made sense for Tobias to put Vivian's soul there. This technically put Vivian in the non-mage layer, which kept her from using her own power to escape. Now, it was a lead in a mystery that Helena had had no idea existed until this evening.  
-So, what brings you here this time?  
Vivian's voice was fainter than it would have been if they had been face to face and technically in the same part of the spirit realm, but still audible. Helena answered her:  
-Daniel told me a few things. However, if what he tells me is true, Tobias shouldn't have been able to do this to you. I think a few things may have been hidden from Daniel.  
-I think you're not quite grasping the full implications of your own theories, Princess. If the mind we know as "Tobias" has existed longer than most people get to, they may know things even Daniel's professors at the Wonder School don't. Ugh.  
Helena saw Vivian's silhouette twitch in pain as her prison was very briefly filled by what looked like miniature bolts of lightning. "Tobias" had realized that double-crossing Vivian while putting her in a situation that gave her plenty of time to think could easily backfire. One of the many spells in her prison hence seemed to be present to cause her pain if she entered certain lines of thought. Both Vivian and Helena had found a way to exploit this, by paying attention to the exact thing that was being discussed when the spell activated. Helena however didn't want to abuse it, if only to keep Vivian more or less on her side while the two of them had to play the roles of a newly reunited mother and young daughter in public. Unfortunately, if Vivian was right, "Tobias" might be the only person able to reverse the switch of bodies. And neither of them had a clear idea of whether "Tobias" was actually planning to do so in the future or not.

Helena was suddenly surrounded by a landscape that could be mistaken for Mora's central market at first glance. The counter of a stall now stood over the location of Vivian's prison. She took this as a signal to wrap herself into a cloaking spell that would get her mistaken for a rogue spirit at a distance. Those cloaking spells were meant to keep everyone coming to that market anonymous and dissuade anyone with more legitimate business in the spirit realm from following them. However, the different ways one could make that spell, acceptable personal touches and the agreed-upon signals to advertise what one was looking for, what they had for sale and various other things others may want to know made it easy for someone sufficiently smart to identify specific individuals. Someone whose death was faked may change the way they presented themselves, but it happened so rarely that it wasn't hard to figure out that a new visitor and an old one that had been lost to anything other than old age were one and the same. Some downsides to being officially dead remained, including the fact that such people had no choice but to buy even basic necessities in illegal markets. If the "deceased" was a mage, they tended to prefer the one that had just appeared. Negotiations and payments happened in an artificial safe area that only existed during late night and extremely early morning, and goods would find a way to turn up wherever the person was hiding. This, combined with the spirit realm location, had earned that market to be known as the market of the dead. As people masquerading as rogue spirits filed in, Helena made a beeline to the illusion counterpart to the Planner's stand, which here belonged to the market of the dead's Coordinator. The current Coordinator had taken his position a few days after the Royal Palace fire, whose official victims had included one of the market's frequent high-ranking visitors. He scorned upon noticing Helena's presence:  
-You.  
-Don't worry, I don't mean to bother you for very long. I've just come here to tell you that Daniel is back in case your own King hasn't informed you yet.  
It was virtually mandatory for the black-market King to be a non-mage, precisely so he could have plausible deniability over the market of the dead's very existence. Helena continued with the other news she had:  
-The means by which he was kept busy for the last three years now prevent him from having any contact with this part of the spirit realm. It's hence up to you whether he finds out whether you're still alive or not.  
-This is easy. He must not know. How many for keeping your mouth shut, and will it be tokens or money?  
Helena was tempted to mention that she had just recently found out first hand just how big that kind of lie could be, to be able to put a high price on her silence. Unfortunately, giving that reason would also tell the Coordinator that she was in possession of an important piece of information. That fact would make it to the black-market King, and if it made it to the black-market King, it would make it to Harald, who would then ask for his spies to actively look out for that piece of information instead of simply doing routine surveillance. She fortunately found a reason that didn't justify much of an increase in price, but had the merit of seemingly telling the Coordinator something he already knew:  
-Go with a thousand, you're asking me to lie to someone I care about. And make it tokens, I may need to do a little shopping here myself.  
-Nine hundred, and a piece of information both you and Daniel will have interest in knowing.  
Helena held back a sigh or relief. Back when he had been officially alive, one of the Coordinator's frequent negotiation moves had boiled down to "if you really care so much about Daniel, you should accept to be paid less than your desired price if I throw in cheap and legally available item that will make a good gift for him".  
-Deal. What's the information?  
-"Vivian" tried to order a large quantity of Moon marble. "She" won't get it because the True Rulers from forty years ago weren't stupid. Even now, the illegal markets are going to make sur that nobody can buy enough of the stuff to make something in which they can fit a person, unless they need it for an actual jail. Daniel should keep an eye on the orphanage if he ends up moving back into the mansion.  
Considering what "Tobias" had done to the councilor of magic's traditional act of charity, Helena considered the Coordinator's worry about the orphanage's future to be completely legitimate. There were almost three hundred children in that place at a given time, and they were just as likely to turn out to have magical powers as the general population. The mansion that was Daniel's by all rights was right next to the orphanage, thanks to the buildings that had been connected together to make it having once been the wisdom councilor's mansion, the national affairs councilor's mansion, the law councilor's mansion, the money councilor's mansion and the foreign affairs councilor's mansion. Nature councilors tended to keep their properties in a semi-wild state either for show or because of genuine belief. Magic councilors tended to have their own nitpicks about how their property was arranged, alongside a never-quite-absent risk of blowing the place up someday. That had resulted in those two properties still standing to this day, while the reason the five other councilors had quarters in the palace instead on their own mansions had become a fun piece of trivia to share with people with minimal knowledge of the country's history. Helena thought it could be a good idea for their group to find a place not too far from the orphanage as well, before realizing the reason for which "Janine" had chuckled earlier. Being aware of two groups of people who didn't realize they held a possible solution to each other's problems tended to be a regular source of amusement for Vivian. The ripple-like feeling in her cloaking spell told Helena she had gotten her payment in full. She had one last thing to tell the Coordinator before doing her shopping:  
-I'll do my best to treat Daniel more fairly this time. Promise.

xxxx

A good night's sleep had given Helena enough wits to no longer accept Sigrun, Lalli and Emil's own word concerning his identity. To Emil's dismay, she now wanted concrete proof, but washing out the dye and shaving his beard weren't options while he was still in the same building as that thing that many thought were the real him. He had tried showing her his birth tattoo and the talisman that had been taken out of his, but she had pointed out that the tattoo could be faked and told him the Royals were hardly the only people who were fitted with those talismans. Helena had decided to test his memory by seeing if he could identify the very man from last night who had made the piece of metal drop out of his ear, who had turned out to be a friend of hers. The man was currently sitting across the table from Emil. Emil only had his own memory to rely on, as Helena had prevented Lalli, Sigrun and Sune from helping him. Emil thought. He must have seen him at least a few times for Helena to expect him to place him. The man had shown that he was a mage. Some acquaintance of Niels or Vivian's, perhaps? The man looked to be around his, Lalli and Helena's age, so he was probably still growing at the time. A guess formed in his mind. He wasn't sure about the face or hairstyle, but the hair color matched.  
-Are you that kid who sometimes showed up with Niels, by any chance? I… think I forgot your name.  
Knowing his old self, he had probably never bothered learning it in the first place.  
-It's Daniel. I technically have a last name, but it's just a random thing the orphanage bestowed upon me when I was a child. Nothing worth remembering.  
-Pleased to make your acquaintance again. Is there any reason you were already here when I woke up?  
-I was chosen to be the new councilor of magic yesterday. I'm also technically Niels' next-of-kin. Between those two facts, I have a nice big house in the town's outskirts to live in. I've been told you and your friends may be looking for a place to stay around town, but feel you have worn out your welcome in the palace. I'd be pleased to have you all, alongside the two members of your close circle who are still in Finmi. There are, however, a couple details you should be made aware of.

The annoyed face "Stig" made after being told the very piece of information that Daniel had wanted to avoid telling him the previous evening was all the proof Helena needed. What surprised her the most was the lack of faces on Sigrun and Lalli's part, as she had introduced Daniel to them as a friendly acquaintance of hers. Sune already knew, as some of Tobias' attempts to break the two of them had included mentioning Daniel. The only way they had found to counter his attempts at keeping them from finding comfort in each other had been to find time to honestly discuss whatever uncomfortable piece of information Tobias had mentioned that day. Because of this, Helena had needed to explain the exact nature of her relationship with Daniel early on. Helena knew the face Emil was making, unfortunately. It had frequently preceded shouted words along the lines of "What right does this person have to have a nice thing I don't? I want a better version of that nice thing right now!". However, instead of the words Helena expected to come, the expression receded from Emil's face, he gave Lalli a glance, then addressed Helena:  
-I… think I see why you would have done this. And honestly, I don't think I had much hopes about that marriage being a pleasant one either. It would have also been a little strange if I had been allowed to have a guy on the side, and you hadn't. If nobody else has a problem with this, I guess it can work at least as a temporary arrangement.

xxxx

Compared to the building that was right across the street from it, the house looked quite small, but still a little bigger and much nicer than Lalli's family home. Giving a second look at the orphanage, Emil could now see the signs of it having once been five separate houses similar to the one he was currently standing in front of. The housekeeper, a woman who looked two or three decades older than Sigrun, welcomed them in and told everyone to pick a room while she showed Helena, Sune and "Janine" the nursery. The catch quickly turned out to be that everyone would need to clean whichever room they picked, but Emil decided it was worth it when they found one in which the bed was big enough to hold both of them and high enough for Lalli to sleep under it if he wished, on the second floor. As Lalli's test of the space under the bed turned into an actual nap, Emil found himself looking for anything he could do without disturbing Lalli. Opening the window to let a little fresh air in looked like a good place to start. The first thing he noticed was that a dark-haired figure wearing leather armor was sitting on the part of the orphanage's roof that was right across from him, and sharpening a knife.  
-Hey, what you doing up here?  
The figure answered back:  
-I'm backup for the people guarding the gates. By the way, was I dreaming or was Daniel part of your group? The person who could be him was already stepping inside by the time I noticed a bunch of people was going into this house.  
-Yes, it was him.  
-Well, tell him Markus would like to know why he didn't bother sending him a single letter in the last three years.  
Daniel's enthusiastic voice came from another window facing the orphanage, which seemed to be over the one Emil was using:  
-Markus? I thought you would have found a job somewhere else by now.  
-All my other options are either not hiring right now or insisted on keeping my old name in their "promising intern" records, then insisted I wasn't in their records when I asked for a job. Would you mind including me in whatever dinner plans you have for yourself and that little court of yours? Like that you'll get to explain me where you have been all this time and who all these people are.

xxxx

-So… let me get this straight. Niels grooms you to be his successor. Rest of the Council gets rid of both you and Niels so they can give the job to that Tobias guy. That Tobias guy dies doing weird magic stuff, they look for a new person, and Lady Vivian picks you. That's… exactly the kind of thing that would happen to you, actually. It reminds me of that time you…  
Emil only half listened, as part of his mind had decided to fixate on the fact that Markus' clothes were much bigger on him than simply being dressed in a second-hand outfit that was a little large could account for. Not only this, but the clothes looked made to have armor worn over them in addition to having familiar colors, which suggested Markus was currently wearing his work clothes without the leather armor pieces. Lalli, who was sitting next to Emil, whispered into his ear:  
-Like Sylvia, but the other way around.  
-Thank you.  
In hindsight, Emil wondered how he hadn't figured that out on his own. He was aware of being quite short by Scandi-born male standards and Markus had been the first man to not remind him of this in quite a while. Sylvia was the niece – nephew in her younger years – of the tea merchant Emil had apprenticed under, and the first time he had interacted with someone in a situation similar to Markus'. Whatever event Markus had been mentioning, it shifted into just the right words to bring Emil's attention back to what he was saying:  
-So that's the daughter the two of you are supposed to have abandoned? I swear I never saw that kid in the last two years. Where in the world was Lady Vivian hiding her?  
Daniel put his fork down and answered solemnly:  
-The answer depends on how seriously you're asking the question.  
Markus gestured towards "Janine":  
-Part of my job is making sure nobody from outside hurts the children. As far as I know, that kid is a two-year-old with a twenty-year-old mother and a thirteen-year-old father. The whole bunch of you are moving right next door. I want the answer that will tell me how much I _actually_ need to keep an eye on the Princess. I've lived long enough to know that nothing distracts people from real threats more than imaginary threats they believe to be real. And that the people in the Council aren't exactly models of virtue.  
Helena ended up being the one answering:  
-In that case, what you need to know is that I have no memory of having a child, yet just about any magical filiation test is going to tell the mage using it that Janine is my daughter and Sune's. I also want to make clear, once again, that the circumstances that would have made Sune and myself produce a child were forced upon both of us. I have the misfortune of already knowing what I would do if my only choices were letting a child die and hurting them in any way. As long as I am not put in circumstances where I have to make that choice again, I can promise I won't hurt any more children. I'm not hungry anymore. I want to be alone.  
Helena left the table, and was soon heard going upstairs. Emil gave a quick glance to Sune, who seemed to have lost his own appetite. Being able to help both Helena and Sune as Stig had required focusing on the fact that whatever had happened had been extremely hard on both of them. However, the reason for which Sune could no longer hear anything from his left ear alone was the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Helena could have been pressured into doing to him in the privacy of Tobias' secret work room. It was one of the many subjects he had vowed to not breach unless Helena breached it first. The little he had just heard was going to take a while to process. Come to think of it, he wasn't hungry anymore either.

xxxx

Enough people had given up on trying to finish up the food that had been made for dinner between the suddenly reduced appetites and those that weren't that big to start with for most of the household to be currently busy cleaning up. Daniel got hold of a bag that's he'd made really sure to bring back to Scandi with him, and gave it to Markus:  
-Sorry it took so much time to get it to you. The good news is that it's even more top-of-the-line than you could hope for. The wing where I was kept had better material than the regular school. The changes in your body should be completed about a year after you decide to first put it on.  
Markus happily welcomed the bag, looked inside it and gave Daniel a tearful hug:  
-Thanks a million. And just to be clear, I'm happy to have you back, as well. But… couldn't you use all that bounty of super-secret magic books to make something that works faster?  
-Something that elaborate working too fast would put too much of a strain on your body. So much that you'd be bedridden for the better part of the year anyway. It working so slowly will also make the day-to-day changes gradual enough that both you and those around you will have proper time to absorb them.  
-As much as I have been waiting for this, I would kind of like to be able to work while it's happening. I'd better head back home to put that on.  
Daniel briefly hesitated to let Markus go. But having him in the house next door was already much better than what he had hoped for.

xxxx

The next morning, Emil couldn't believe his ears:  
-What do you mean, not a morning person? He was already in the room when I woke up yesterday morning!  
Sigrun, who was already in full bodyguard gear, answered:  
-The meal we were getting ready when you woke up was lunch, not breakfast. Daniel had been awake for only about an hour. This is not important right now. Help me get him into real clothes already.  
They both went to the room that Daniel had picked for himself to find that Lalli had already done part of the job. Somehow, they managed to have Daniel on the house's front steps, half-awake, dressed and cleaned up by the time he was supposed to leave if he was to reach the palace in time. Sigrun gave Emil and Lalli a pat on the shoulder:  
-That wasn't too bad. It's still going to be easier once Mikkel and Reynir get here. And if we can figure out how to avoid having too many mornings where nobody has the heart to try waking Mama, Papa and Baby too early. I feel we forgot something, though.  
Daniel's stomach growled as if to prove that last sentence right. The following moment, a horse-drawn carriage whose contents were a rather plainly clothed middle-aged man with graying dark brown hair and a blonde girl in her early teens stopped in front of the house. Emil almost greeted Rolf by name, before remembering that he had yet to be properly introduced to him as Stig, and that this detail made him one of the councilors the less likely to know who he really was. Rolf spoke:  
-Good job for a first day working for him. Runa and myself have yet to eat breakfast as well. We plan to get food on the way. We have two extra seats in here. Care to join us?  
Both Daniel and Sigrun got into the carriage, which soon drove away, revealing one of the orphanage's gate guards stifling a laugh. Emil looked up to see if he could make out whoever was on the roof spot Markus had been occupying the previous evening. While he didn't see him, he heard his voice:  
-Don't be to surprised. Niels was quite the night owl, so Rolf got used to making sure he got to Council meetings on time. If you think Daniel's stomach was loud just now, you should have heard the collective moaning of the servants the morning after he moved in.

Wait… he knew those bells. They did their job in terms of getting him completely awake.  
-Ha, I knew it was a good idea to keep those.  
Daniel realized that he was in the middle of eating a breakfast pastry, that the voice that had spoken was Rolf's, and the person wiggling the bell-decorated magic councilor's headdress in front of him looked like an older version of Runa. Wait… it probably _was_ Runa. He finished the pastry hoping it would help him wake up completely, but what he really needed was strong tea. Maybe Emil would know of something that would do the trick. Once he was done with the food, Runa gave him the headdress:  
-Don't forget to thank Master Rolf for keeping the bells. Councilor Tobias really hated them and pulled them right off.  
Daniel promptly turned to Rolf to thank him, and in the process realized they were right next to the door to the council room. Sigrun was there, as well. He realized he was clothed, but didn't have any memory of getting dressed. Their group had stopped to get Daniel new clothes on the way between the palace and the mansion, but… Uh oh…  
-Sigrun, who chose my clothes?  
-"Stig" did, so chances are that people who care what you're wearing will approve. He has surprisingly good taste when he's given enough options to work with.  
Reassured, Daniel gave the clothes he was wearing a quick look, and approved. Maybe he should have Emil officially be his dresser in addition to his tea maker. He also had a third job for him in mind, that one more compatible with Emil's own ambitions.


	7. The necklace

**The necklace**

The only advantage Vivian saw to the situation was that she couldn't do much involuntary spying from lying in that child's crib for most of the day. She had managed to figure out exactly what feeling in the back of her head was associated with the moments Tobias was using her eyes and ears as their own. She had also noticed that they would give a "quick glance" if something in her surroundings sparked her interest. This _also_ happened if she made any kind of active effort to block out sounds or not look at something, in hope of keeping Tobias from being made aware of it. The only way she had to _not_ be a spy was to leave the room or to be sleeping. The first option was limited because nobody in their right mind would leave a two-year-old both alone and with any kind of real liberty of movement. The second option wasn't that much better, because it was the time at which any information Tobias hadn't been "there" for during the day somehow made it to them. She considered informing the "younger ones" about the fact that delaying her bedtime could delay the moment Tobias found out about something if it became crucial to something that would profit her in the future. Otherwise, the fact that the "younger ones" were already operating on the assumption that Tobias could potentially know of anything they did around the body she was currently occupying was enough. The price she had to pay for her involuntary spying being suspended was that Helena and Sune's play-parenting was becoming unbearable:  
-But as the years went by, people of the Wonderful Island started feeling lonely, and started wondering if the Great Sickness had really killed everyone else in the world. So, they sent out a boat. After a few days of sailing, the boat found another one, bearing the flag of the kingdom of Vege. The two boats came closer to each other…  
Sune was had been telling her the same handful of children's stories in a tone of voice more suitable for an actual two-year-old for the last couple of days, both passing as a good father to the housekeeper and the occasional visitors while contributing to covering up the sound of whatever everyone else was doing or discussing. Thinking about the housekeeper, Vivian couldn't help wondering once again whether her spilling very hot gravy on her had actually been an accident, of if she knew that sufficiently severe burns were the wound those artificial bodies took the most time to recover from, even with the help of healing magic. Fortunately, one of the friends Emil had sent for, and who was supposed to show up within the week, happened to have enough odd job experience to do most of the housekeeper's tasks. That would get them rid of the sole member of the household whose loyalties were an immediate concern. At the rate at which she was healing, her recovery was going to be complete by the next day. She was going to be disappointed if the "younger ones" didn't use that reprieve wisely.

Emil, Daniel and Helena were sitting on the edge of a sandbox meant for practice in drawing large runes located in the mansion's back yard. Daniel was making various simple drawings in the sand as he spoke:  
-Magic and wisdom are out of the question, as they both require the person holding the seat to be a mage. You should probably forget national relations, as well. It honestly requires a level of giving priority to Scandi's interests that it's a little hard to keep after living outside the country for as long as you have. It's also best that we play "enemy of my enemy is my friend" with Randi at least until we get the Vivian situation fixed. The foreign relations seat requires to be much more of an international traveler than you have been so far. This is quite easy to fix on paper, but one of the drawbacks is that it may be the easiest way for you to die without anyone in the Council needing to lift a finger. Some of the places you need to have visited at least once are only reachable by boat, and bad weather can show up out of nowhere. Money… actually requires to be a non-mage, and having experience as a merchant helps. The other responsibility that comes with it may not be the best fit for you, however.  
Emil raised an eyebrow:  
-Why, what's wrong with it?  
Helena explained:  
-The True Rulers and the illegal markets have always needed each other. What is and isn't legal to sell or purchase changes with the times, and the illegal things often happen to be greatly appreciated or outright needed by at least one member of the Council. Both sides make arrangements via a representative. The black-market has the black-market King, the Council has the money councilor. Their biggest source of slaves is Finmi. Fastest way to get slaves that speak a language that is very different from Scandi.  
Emil sighed. Not the second responsibility that would suit him the best, indeed. The next question quickly came:  
-What do law and nature have as their other responsibilities?  
Helena once again provided the answer:  
-Rolf's boils down to dissuading people who have a lot of money from keeping wild animals and plants as status symbols. Knowing how they think could help with that. Tanja supervises a prisoner rehabilitation center. The main quality needed here is the ability to give a second chance to those the rest of society has given up on. From my own experience, you are able to do a decent job at that.  
Emil suddenly realized there had been a misunderstanding:  
-If you're talking about befriending you as Stig, it's really you and Sune I wanted to help. If you had been complete strangers, or even acquaintances with the same allegations against you, I don't think I would have invited you to have a drink at the tavern.  
Both Helena and Daniel looked at him like he had grown a second head, briefly looked at each other, then both seemed about to say something without spitting it out. Helena crossed her arms and ended up being the first to speak:  
-Most people have things they won't tolerate, even coming from close friends or family. Others simply care about their reputation within their preferred crowd above everything else, and will cut ties with any friend or family member who becomes "embarrassing", at least publicly. My own parents and siblings are practically willing to pay me to _not_ seek refuge with them. Sune's family is fine with having me around only because some mix of being kept in the dark and not realizing that even the story the Council told them is messed up.  
Once Helena was done, Daniel used the stick to point towards the orphanage, which was visible due to both Daniel and Rolf's yards being decently sized – there was just about enough space between the two large houses to build a third one about the same size – and lacking anything that could block the view:  
-The predecessor of Randi's who handed over her house for extra space did so after realizing that older children and younger adults could get cut off from their families simply for being a challenge to their parents' deeply held beliefs. Long story short, you'd be wrong to consider your good will towards Helena and Sune to be something unremarkable.  
Emil gave a quick glance at their own house's second floor, which was going to be the closest he was going to get to looking at the room in which Lalli was currently sleeping. Maybe he did have some capacity to accept things many other people didn't. He heard Daniel scribbling some things in the sand, before uttering an "uh-oh". Emil gave a quick look at what Daniel had written, to see it was a list of the names of the True Rulers, starting with Tanja's and ending with his own. In between them, the order of the names was Rolf, Harald, Vivian, Kenneth and Randi. Emil raised an eyebrow:  
-What's with the names? And why are you worried?  
-I've listed them by relative age. Being chosen to replace a councilor who resigned or died without any outside intervention is the only somewhat honest way to get their seat. The trouble is that Tanja and Rolf are the oldest – both of them are over sixty – their resignations for age reasons are going to come sooner than those of everyone else. This means less time for you to catch up with their preferred successors and other people hoping to take over their seats. If those both get taken over by someone other than you, they won't be vacant for a few decades unless the new holder is made to resign early in some way or an "accident" happens.  
Emil swallowed. He wasn't quite sure when his mind had caught onto the fact that Niels was among those who had died in the fire caused by Tobias, but it was something he no longer risked forgetting. They would all need to figure out a way to get one of those two seats without getting him killed along the way, and hopefully without getting too much blood on his own hands. Helena interrupted his thoughts:  
-I'd suggest you give priority to one of the two, and have the other as your back-up plan. Is there one you would prefer over the other? You'll need to learn a lot of new things no matter which one you choose. Rolf being our next-door neighbor doesn't matter much, we are pretty much in an "if the enemy is in range, so are you" situation with him.  
Emil was about to ask if had to answer immediately, when he realized he had an idea of which one he wanted to try first.

xxxx

Even commercial law was much more complicated than Emil expected it to be. He briefly considered giving priority to nature instead, but the sight of Runa being surrounded by as many books as Daniel was told him that it would probably be just as much work. To have a chance, he would have to make sense of the contents of the books that Daniel had given him before starting the work he had come to the library to do. The last three years had given Emil a new respect for all sorts of jobs he had considered beneath him prior to the palace fire, but making him a believable working-class refugee-turned-merchant had resulted in him only getting few and far between occasions to truly appreciate what Tuuri had done for him as his scribe. Right next to Emil, Sune was reading the one book he had already finished, and seeming to be going through it faster than he had:  
-Are you actually reading this, or just bored?  
-Actually reading it. It's quite interesting. Many of those rules look reasonable on their own, but things get a little weird when several of them can apply to the same thing.  
Emil let out a sigh of relief:  
-Good to know I'm not the only one having trouble with that.  
-Shh!  
The hushing sound came from both Daniel and Runa, who were sharing the other side of the four-seat table. It was just their luck that the only table in the Royal Library with three free seats had already been occupied by the teenage girl upon their arrival. Both Emil and Sune continued their reading. For a long time, the only sounds coming from the table were pages being turned, books getting put down and Runa taking sips from what seemed to be a stout metal kettle's spout. Daniel had mentioned that even as an actual child, Runa had been able to spend hours at a time reading as long as she had something to drink within her reach, and had found that some kettle shapes made good water containers with a reduced chance of spilling on the books. After an amount of time Emil wasn't quite sure of, instead of being put back on the table, the kettle fell on the floor, soon followed by its owner. Daniel got up from his seat, pulling out from under his shirt what Emil could now recognize as a more elaborate version of Helena and Reynir's medical diagnosis talisman, pressed it on her forehead, then looked at the kettle, that was now leaking a little near its lid due to having landed sideways. Emil promptly used a piece of cloth that Daniel has asked every single member of the household to keep on hand for such occasions to pick the kettle up without touching it, then wrap it. Sune's own piece of cloth was used to mop up the little water that had leaked out of out of the kettle, then got "absent-mindedly" placed in his leather belt bag. Any real investigation would be satisfied with the kettle and its remaining contents, and they would have something with which to compare any poison they ran into at a later point. When Emil paid attention to Daniel again, the latter had Runa in a security position and seemed to be tending to her, which told him that she had a chance to make it.

xxxx

Runa was now in a bed in the hospital's recovery ward and in the care of professionals, but Emil, Daniel and Sune couldn't leave yet. When someone was brought in for poisoning, anyone who had been in position to see what had happened had to be temporarily detained, due to their potential both as witnesses and culprits. The only reason they were in a separate room was that someone had recognized both Daniel and Sune and realized it would be best for them to be kept separate from the other detainees, alongside their "attendant". The first person who came to see them after they were moved wasn't one Emil was expecting:  
-Randi? What are you doing here?  
Daniel, Sune and Randi all shot him looks that told him that she was probably in that hospital because _it was the one she was running_.  
-I could ask the three of you the same thing, honestly. I understand you probably needed to check a few books for work and decided to put some under those two's noses while you were at it, but the fact that you were all sitting at the same table as her isn't going to look good. Even the fact that you saved her life is going to look suspicious to some and her being lucky to others.  
Daniel replied, putting a hand on his hip:  
-I came into the library in the middle of the afternoon with two companions. There was nowhere else for all three of us to sit. This is all there is to it.  
Randi crossed her arms:  
-This means that you would have possibly been able to sit somewhere else if you had taken only one person with you. People are going to wonder why _both_ of them came along.  
-My tea server is considering starting a business here in Mora, but I advised him to get familiar with the local law before he did so. Prince Sune has spent the past few days being a very attentive father. "Stig" and I happened to be leaving for the library right when another member of the household offered to watch his daughter for a few hours and suggested him to do something for himself during that time.  
Due to regularly getting news of Vivian via Daniel's "ghost trick", Randi knew about the gravy incident, and the reason someone would want Sune to relax a little. Randi spoke:  
-I'm going to see what I can do about having the three of you allowed to go back to your home. The last things I need to deal with are Helena and the members of your household who use their blades more than they use their brains. This reminds me: what, exactly, does your brother know about "Janine"?  
-Markus inquired about her when he first saw her because he had never seen her among the orphanage kids, and Helena mentioned the fact that from her own perspective, she never had any children, but that magical filiation tests will say otherwise. Anything else probably emerged while he was chatting with his friends. I'm not up to date on the status of that piece of information otherwise.  
Randi let out a light, but frustrated sigh:  
-According to my sources, the rumor according to which a sufficiently talented mage can alter the results of magical readings – filiation tests in particular – has been making a big come-back. There are now all sorts of theories about who "Janine" really is, and far too few people seem willing to consider the possibility that she's just yet another unwanted child born of two commoners.  
Daniel's expression turned sympathetic:  
-Let me guess. People are now digging up the names of just about any different-sex couple that was either suspected or known to have an affair around the time at which she would have been conceived, and everyone is now remembering the half possessing the proper organs to have either started getting fat or stopped appearing in public during the handful of months before her supposed birth? Humm… How much longer did you and Kenneth last after I left for the Isle?  
Emil held back an expression of surprise as Randi answered:  
-Good catch. Timing has it so that we broke things off during the supposed beginning or early stages of the pregnancy, and I started spending time with Vivian outside of the council room right around the time at which the birth would have happened. Now, add the fact that some servant has overheard you giving me "Janine's" news.  
Daniel let go of his hip to start scratching his chin:  
-I see the problem. But I would assume you would be the first to know that coverups can be double-edged.  
Randi pinched the ridge of her nose and close her eyes:  
-It's not just that. Those spells you put on my room aren't keeping "Vivian" out. I'm considering having a guard in my rooms, but I'm having trouble finding someone who's willing to both to believe there is a threat and to stand between "Vivian" and something "she" wants. But if "Janine" was my daughter rather than Helena's, I would have a good reason to visit your house on a regular basis, and maybe fall asleep there from time to time.  
Daniel was clearly taken aback, but scratched his chin for a few moments before answering:  
-I'll need to ask the other members of the household about this, and think it over.

xxxx

The three of them headed back to the house as soon as they were allowed to. Daniel promptly asked Emil and Sune about their thoughts about having Randi in the house on a regular basis. Sune was the one currently answering:  
-I'm still mad at her for her part in my situation and Helena's… but I don't want her to get hurt the same way Helena and I did because of it. If coming to the house is really her only solution, I'd be okay with it. But I'm wondering… if "Vivian" leaves her alone, and starts hurting someone else… do we take them in also? And the person after that? Whoever comes after Randi is probably going to deserve that treatment even less than her, so the less bad option may be to…  
Daniel answered:  
-I see where you are going with this, and you would have had a point if we weren't currently harboring someone who cares about Randi's well-being on a personal level. This is the reason I even bothered putting a few spells on her rooms the other day. If we decide to help Randi, whoever ends up in "Vivian's" hands next will unfortunately have to be the "punching bag" until we get everyone back in their proper place.  
-And what if "she" picks Markus? Or one of your younger siblings? The oldest pair must be around fifteen by now. And the next down must be ten. What about your siblings' friends inside the orphanage? How many people do we need to make sure are safe before whoever "Vivian" picks next is certain to be someone we won't care enough about to help?  
-Excellent question, considering "she" may also decide to pick a Royal.  
The worryingly neutral tone both Daniel and Sune had slipped into by that point made Emil wonder if they both really being that heartless about the subject matter, or making great efforts to avoid shouting at each other or bursting into tears. After a few moments of shutting off the conversation to think a little, he realized that those scenarios weren't necessarily mutually exclusive to each other… and that it did nothing to make the conversation he was witnessing any better. He ended up asking Daniel about the least disturbing part of the conversation he could think of:  
-Excuse me, but what is that thing about you having siblings? I thought you grew up in the orphanage until you became Niels' student.  
Both Daniel and Sune's first response was to be stopped on their tracks, while having a look of relief. The following moment, Daniel looked bemused:  
-Didn't I…  
Sune voiced the situation faster than Emil's mind could fetch for it:  
-You told him "come have dinner with us, we'll be waiting for you" from across the street, we let him in when he showed up, and the two of you started catching up almost immediately. I don't think the members of the household who didn't know of him beforehand picked up on more than friendship between the two of you.  
They all resumed walking as Daniel explained:  
-The councilor of wisdom's orphanage tries to both keep orphaned siblings together and give orphans with no other ties a surrogate family unit. The bedrooms sleep six. In the surrogate families, children are moved into the room sometime after they turn three, and move out of them when they turn eighteen. A new pair of three-year-olds is moved into the room every five years. Children who shared a room for any amount of time are considered siblings. I moved in with Niels before my thirteenth birthday, so I tend to consider I only really have two brothers and a sister. That's still three people that… oops, your question had the merit of getting me out of a quite gloomy line of thought, and I'm diving right back into it.  
Before Emil could ask him what that last sentence was about, a couple of thin arms wrapped themselves around him from behind, and a sharp-chinned face came to rest on his right shoulder:  
-The loud ones are worried because you are all late. Can you get home a little faster?  
Both Daniel and Sune were wide-eyed. Come to think of it, this was probably the first time both of them witnessed the extent to which Lalli could show up out of nowhere when he wanted to. Daniel from the little time he had known him, Sune from the fact that they had very rarely been in the same place before they had ended up both being part of the same group travelling to Scandi. A quick look at the horizon and a growl from his stomach reminded Emil that the whole incident had indeed made them head back to the house much later than they had originally intended to. He knew a likely other reason Lalli had grown impatient; differences in sleeping hours made the evening and early morning precious time to them.

As they finished their walk home, Emil started explaining what had happened to Lalli, and really sounded like he thought their detention was an overreaction on the part of the library and hospital's personnel. Sune had trouble telling whether Lalli was actually listening or not. Once the news of "Stig's" real identity had worn off, it had been easy to see the reason for which so many people had admitted to not missing Emil much while he had been assumed to be dead. And again, he had been much worse before the palace fire if Helena and Daniel were to be believed. What had made Emil fun to be around when Sune had been a child now made him come across as ill-suited to the very world his was trying to take part in. Because of that, over the past few days, Sune had ended up dedicating a corner of his mind to wondering who of Emil and Lalli had ended up stuck with the other in the marriage, hoping he would eventually witness an interaction between them that would give him an answer. According to Emil's own words, doing something for the sake of proving to others that he could do it "just wasn't Lalli's thing". At the time at which Emil had said this during a conversation that had randomly drifted towards the subject, Sune had taken it to mean that Lalli simply had no talent that was worth showing off, and was modest enough to realize it. What had just happened gave Sune second thoughts about the way he had interpreted those words. He remembered that Lalli had been introduced to him as minor mage when they had met in his home, and decided to walk a little closer to Daniel to ask him a few questions:  
-Was that some kind of magic "ghost trick"?  
-No, plain old regular stealth.  
-Could he have picked this up working as a night guard for his family?  
-It's possible. But if he got trained for this before getting sent to the palace with Tuuri, it would explain a lot.  
It did give credence to the story according to which Lalli and Reynir had been able to get Emil away from the palace without anyone else noticing, if anything.

xxxx

Helena still didn't believe she had agreed to do this. However, the circumstances made all the other plans she could think of almost certain to have an even worse outcome, or gave them too many unknowns to her taste. And since one of the people present in the dining room knew much less than everyone else, they were the perfect test subject for the new official story:  
-She looks nothing like Randi. Or Kenneth. They also both have hair far lighter than hers, and I'm quite sure things don't work that way.  
Helena briefly considered that Markus could be put to better use to the world if he left the building security business and got hired by some higher-ranked official to point out any holes in their cover stories that were easy to spot from the outside.  
-This isn't her real appearance, of course.  
-That could explain why I've never seen her before… but not why nobody just told me that the first time I asked. I get that you visited memories you didn't want to visit that day and had to leave the table, but it looks like something anyone who knew could have just told me over the past week. So either nobody else knew in spite of having had a week to get an answer to any of their own questions about the girl, or the truth is so convoluted that at least two members of the Council would rather become part of the cover story than let it come out.  
-Or maybe Randi wanted to see what would happen in the week after letting you know partial information before you were allowed to know the full story.  
Markus let out a resigned sigh:  
-That would make sense. I'm still keeping the "truth too convoluted to come out" possibility on a low flame in case all this really is a cover story and it starts getting cracks someday.  
As far as Helena was concerned, Markus' approach to the information was a sound strategy for someone who was as close as family to a councilor, but was best kept out of as many of the actual conspiracies as possible. Sigrun, who happened to have "Janine" within arm's reach, ruffled the child's hair a little more than she usually did when she was pretend-doting:  
-Now she looks a little more like her mother, doesn't she?  
Markus let out a laugh:  
-You're right, I can see the resemblance at little better, now.  
Helena sighed and transferred "Janine" from her lap to the empty sitting cushion next to Sune, who was much better versed in the art of fixing hair without any kind of tool than she was. She was actually starting to feel a little sorry for Vivian at this point; this was the other reason she was ready to let Randi visit from time to time in spite of the drawbacks, both potential and obvious.

xxxx

The next morning, Rolf showed up early enough to join the household for breakfast. The morning routine had managed to organize itself enough for Daniel to be already dressed and cleaned up. A tea recipe from Finmi whose ingredients were easily purchasable in the Mora market had turned out to do wonders for properly waking him up. The catch was that Daniel needed to actually drink it for that to happen, and that had become a daily struggle for Emil, who was currently still working on it. After he answered the obligatory questions about Runa's current health status and explained she would need to rest for a few days to completely recover, Sune was surprised to see Rolf turn to him:  
-This brings me to the fact that I have come here to ask you a favor. Your brother has been clamoring for a small monkey like the one he saw in the possession of an animal trainer for weeks, probably a couple months at this point. Such animals come from very, _very_ , far away, and few people have any idea on how to keep them alive on a long journey. Ten will probably die in transit for one to even make it inside the country, let alone to Mora. And if your brother gets one, a bunch of other people who can afford the purchase are going to want one. Before Tobias' untimely death, Vivian was quite good at understanding why it was best to not let your brother have that monkey. Over the past few days, her stance seems to have moved to "let him have it if it will make him shut up". I gave Runa the task to change your brother's mind, and she was supposed to meet him this morning for that purpose. If you know of a way to sway him on this particular subject, I would be very grateful.  
Sune decided to think about it a little, just in case he did come up with an idea. One of the things he had done while everyone else was distracted had been giving a quick look at what Runa had been reading, and had noticed that her book had been left open at the page about the behavior a specific type of small monkey. An idea did, indeed, cross his mind.

xxxx

Håkan half-suspected Sune to have secretly swapped the placid child he and Helena had shown up with at the masquerade ball with a much more energetic, unruly and survival instinct lacking one who bore an uncanny resemblance to her. The audience he was expecting to have with Runa had turned into having to watch the child while Sune ran an unexpectedly long errand he had suddenly remembered needing to take care of. It had quickly turned out to be impossible to both fix the mess the child made and keep her from making more of one. If she wasn't making a mess, she was trying to climb on things, including the windowsill and the elaborately sculpted posts of his canopy bed. Fortunately, by the time Sune was back, she had found satisfaction in playing with the piece of Moon marble Håkan was wearing as a necklace. The larger silver medallion to which the coin-size piece of marble was attached also seemed to make it much less tasty to her than his other jewelry, which meant she had quickly given up on chewing on it. Håkan gladly gave Sune the child back, only to discover she now refused to let go of the necklace:  
-Sorry, but you can't have it. I need it to keep bad mages from casting spells on me.  
Sune spoke as he was trying to pry the necklace out of his daughter's hands:  
-This isn't going to ward off anything.  
Was Sune stupid, or what?  
-I thought Helena was supposed to be an extremely knowledgeable mage. I would expect you to know that jails in which they put mages who break the law in the Great Isle of Icy Wonders are made of the same stone.  
-It's true, but claiming that this little thing will protect you from spells is like claiming that I'll make my daughter bald if I pull ten hairs off her head. Another thing you may be interested in knowing is that I saw a little of the book Runa was reading when she collapsed from the poison, and it mentioned that monkeys like the one you want act a lot like a child around her age for their entire lifetime.

xxxx

Sune looked at the section of the market holding the most expensive stalls, and addressed Rolf, who was standing next to him:  
-I thought councilors of nature were supposed to be against people using their money on that kind of stuff.  
-If it's already in the capital and on a legal market, you're doing much less damage to the world than procuring your brother that monkey would have. Seeing to that is part of my job.  
Sune looked at him skeptically.  
-If you pick something that I may have been a little lenient on because I owed Harald or Kenneth a favor, I'll tell you. Now go pick something. Even if you've lost your own taste for nice things, there must be at least one person in your household who misses having easy access to them.  
Sune put "Janine" and his shoulders, and started browsing the stalls, in case he ran into something that could actually be useful. Helena frequently reminded him that many currently widespread items had once been luxuries. He was suddenly stopped when "Janine" took hold of the canvas of what turned out to be a stall selling jewelry consisting of small pieces of marble mounted on larger metal medallions, often with matching chains. The selection included silver-mounted Moon marble similar to Håkan's necklace. Sune put on his best doting father face and took her off his shoulders to get her closer to the display:  
-You did do most of the work, after all. How about you choose what Rolf is buying for us.  
She picked one of the Moon marble and silver necklaces.  
-Come on, Rolf is paying, we can get something with a little gold in it.  
Right when he finished the sentence, Sune realized _Håkan_ could afford to have a solid gold one. The silver one, it was.

Daniel came back to the carriage form his own errands right when they did. As soon as the carriage started running, Rolf spoke:  
-I thought that this child was supposed to be…  
Sune remembered that Rolf was among those who knew of "Janine's" true origins according to Randi. Fortunately, Daniel stepped in to explain:  
-She may have been when Tobias introduced her to you all, but he made her into something much closer to an actual child before she was tossed into Helena's hands. By the way, what did you end up getting?  
Sune took the necklace out of his belt bag and showed it to Daniel. Leaving the market with the necklace actually around anyone's neck would have gotten plenty of people mistaken on the amount of money he actually had at his disposal.  
-Nice. Honestly, I think it looks much better on silver. And that it's too bad that you get odd looks for wearing jewelry made of the stuff or anything of a similar color if you're a mage, even if the quantities involved are usually too small to actually do anything.  
Sune vaguely remembered Helena telling him about this at some point, as well.  
-Would you mind giving it a quick look? "Janine" was the one who chose it, and it looks a lot like a necklace Håkan was wearing.  
Daniel took the necklace and started examining it:  
-A Royal who settles for something less than gold? Your brother may not be too far gone after all. Uh… I think I see where that "don't wear Moon marble jewelry if you're a mage" thing may have come from. Keep going without me, I need to have a word with Harald.  
Daniel vanished out of the carriage.


	8. Magda day: Morning

**Note:** I'm introducing the setting's heteronormative standard enforcers this chapter, so blanket trans trigger warning to be safe. There is some mention of stigmatization of certain sexual orientations as well.

 **Magda day: Morning**

The jeweler's guild kept samples of silver from various mines to be able to test them against any suspected false claims about the origin of the materials used to make a given piece of jewelry. Daniel found exactly one sample to have the same properties as the silver from the necklace. Unless one looked specifically for enhancement of Moon marble properties, specifically by putting a piece of Moon marble in contact with the piece of silver, it was impossible to notice that the silver sample had anything special about it; that included using magic to look for anything odd. Daniel was only mildly surprised when the silver sample turned out to be from a mine that Tobias had gotten re-opened during his tenure as councilor of magic. The mine had been closed for more than forty years at that point. Harald had only been able to get a limited amount of information relevant to his function from the archives secured with the black-market King before the palace fire, and it hadn't included any information about the silver from that specific mine. Tobias had claimed to want to research the use of silver in magic and to need it to be mined and treated in a specific way, which was easier to implement by letting him re-start the exploitation of a closed mine. With nothing but a map showing the mine's location and the sample in the jeweler's guild remaining of the mine, Vivian had seen no reason to oppose it. Unfortunately, there wasn't any direct evidence to back Daniel's hunch that "Tobias" had something to do with Håkan acquiring his own necklace. According to what he had told Daniel, the young prince had simply found the necklace under his pillow one evening, with a now-burned note that had done a good job of convincing him to wear it at all times in spite of the fact that it was at least a third choice by Royal standards. The "ghost trick" shared by Daniel and "Tobias" was unfortunately only one among many means by which the items could have been sneaked into Håkan's room. The only thing potentially pointing in "Tobias'" direction was that Håkan had acquired the necklace after Tobias' "death", upon which "Vivian" had had the possibility of having another mage continue any research of Tobias' that looked promising. The entire rest of the council knew "she" had taken over a decent amount of it "herself". Harald's voice interrupted Daniel's thoughts:  
-I've left you plenty of time to think. Do you have any idea of who would want to give a magic-reducing piece of jewelry to prince Håkan? If it was really for protection, Vivian would have given it to Princess Anna instead, and _you_ seem to have taken to picking up our discarded bits.  
Daniel unfortunately couldn't tell Harald the reason for which "Vivian" may have recently shifted more than a few loyalties, at least outside of a situation where it would be very obviously worth it; he, Tanja, Rolf and Kenneth were unfortunately just as likely to help with the situation as they were to take advantage of it if they were told about it.  
-If I had any idea of who did it, I would tell you in hope that it was worth the mine's map "having a copy that miraculously escaped the fire". How much is it going to be, by the way?  
Harald feigned embarrassment by scratching the back of his neck:  
-The black-market King needs a quiet place where nobody will expect him to be to do some bookkeeping for a day or two. I've been having trouble finding the "or two". What are the chances of your household keeping their mouths shut or conveniently being absent? Though the exercise in keeping mouths shut could be useful to any Tiny Council you may be training in there.  
The "Tiny Council" referred to the tendency of some councilors to have their house employees gain knowledge on the domains of expertise of their colleagues to have someone with whom to test their arguments. If a seat other than that of their own employer opened up, it wasn't rare for sufficiently skilled and experienced "Tiny Council" members to be among the strongest competitors for the seat. Emil aiming for Tanja's seat, and the use he was hoping to get out of Sune in the future were the closest Daniel currently was to forming a "Tiny Council" of his own.  
-Considering my employees, they could use reasons to leave the house more. And one of them would have a ready-made reason to do so if his license to sell merchandise in town became available a little faster.  
-That tea-maker of yours, right? If you come to see me using that "ghost trick" of yours, you may get it to him the day before he would normally receive it. For anything faster, my hands are tied. You'd have to "encourage" a couple of random clerks, not me. And if you have bribing money lying around, it will probably best put towards making sure Princess Helena's daughter doesn't get snatched up by the next Daughters of Magda patrol.  
Those happened once a year on the name day of the order's patron figure, which was less than a week away. The Daughters of Magda had very narrow criteria for certain aspects of what made a proper family and had taken to abuse a law authorizing people to remove children from households they considered unsafe for them. Only a limited portion of the city guard could be dedicated to keeping an eye on them and protecting their potential targets without significantly reducing the personnel dedicated to things that could potentially happen all year round. Like many situations in which the supply was much smaller than the demand, that resulted in those with money and connections grabbing what was available and the rest having to make do with drawback-ridden alternatives and whatever a handful of generous souls were willing to spare. By Daughters of Magda criteria, Daniel's own household could be deemed "unsafe" for at least two different reasons. He had chosen to not pry into Helena and Vivian's plans for that day, as some means of escaping the patrols relied on as few people as possible knowing where the child was that day. Others took the opposite approach and made sure the child had as many trusted eyes on them as possible. Daniel took the opportunity to point out one of the issues he had noticed about the "fake Helena having a daughter fathered by Sune" plan that the other True Rulers had agreed to:  
-I'm a little curious about something, if the information won't cost me extra. Faking the existence of a child whose father would have been ten years old at the time of her conception might as well be asking for a patrol to "rescue" both father and daughter. Were there any plans to keep Sune and Janine safe from the patrols if they ended up staying in Scandi, but not residing in the palace?  
Harald answered with a shrug:  
-Tobias insisted it wouldn't be a problem, even when Vivian pointed out that this exact scenario was a possibility. He took whatever plan he had to the grave. Guess that little family is lucky you're back, have the house and still care enough about the Princess to take them in.  
Daniel was tempted to give the black-market King a second bookkeeping day in the house for finding out that Tobias had been the one with plans to deal with the Daughters of Magda patrols in regards to "Janine". However, he had several reasons to not let Harald know just how important that information was to him and other members of his household.

xxxx

When Daniel made it back to the house, Helena turned out to have been using "Janine's" daily naps to make Magda day plans for her over the past few days. Helena took advantage of the fact that the current day's nap was underway to explain her plans to the other members of the household:  
-From what we can tell, we have three options that are the right combination of being safe and not looking odd to outside observers. Unfortunately, they all hold a risk of putting "Janine" right where "Tobias" wants her if they have any plans involving her that day. The councilor of wisdom's orphanage is usually left alone and always lets a few children blend in with the orphans. I've gotten a message from one of the caretakers telling me there were spots for Janine and Sune due to a couple of "one-day" children aging out of their age groups from last year. Another possibility is to hide them in Runa's hospital room. Runa was originally slated to leave the hospital that day, but the patrols have been trying to find a way to "rescue" her ever since Rolf took her in, so Randi thought it would be best for her to stay an extra day. Finally, we could have them stay in the palace with the Royals. Any thoughts or suggestions? To cut to the chase, the park gatherings are definitely not an option for us. We all know that none of the crowds I would want to help would want to associate with me, and I wouldn't want to associate with most members of the crowds that would be fine having me around in spite of my reputation.  
Among those gathered in the dining room, Emil was the first to speak:  
-I see why the orphanage option may look suspicious to you. But I'm not sure I see what you have against leaving them with the family. They won't hurt either of them, and they are the best-guarded people in the country.  
Sune replied with a shuddering tone:  
-They still have those control runes inside them. "Tobias" can make them do all sorts of things against their own will. There's also the fact that I've spent so little time having actual honest conversations with any of them over the past three years that one of them could have gotten swayed by the Daughters of Magda or a group with similar beliefs where it matters, and I wouldn't notice. They may not need to be magically controlled to be convinced to hand "Janine" – or even me – over to people she shouldn't be handed over to.  
Sune's words reminded Daniel of piece of news that Markus had had for him on that first evening of catching up. If anyone else at the table had been reminded of it as well, they didn't bring it up. Meanwhile, Emil answered Sune's statement with an expression that indicated that the possibility of a magical takeover of their family members, or one of them doing the wrong thing while thinking they were doing the right thing, hadn't crossed his mind. The half-slumped position Emil took on after that made it hard to tell whether he was overwhelmed by the realization or deep in thought. Lalli spoke:  
-Even if you find a good place to hide Vivian from the women who take children, not-Vivian will be able to find her wherever you take her because "she" sees and hears the same things as actually-Vivian. And not-Vivian can just come get actually-Vivian if "she" really wants her to be somewhere tomorrow.  
In response, Helena produced the necklace Sune had purchased earlier in the day:  
-I've thought of this, and this just turned out to be able to help us. "Janine's" eyesight and hearing are technically spells. The magic-dampening effects of the necklace are enough to make her vision very blurry and greatly reduce her hearing. The surveillance spells are linked to her senses, so it would greatly limit the means by which Tobias could find out where she is. Unfortunately, if she ends up in the hands of someone who notices that the necklace is impairing her senses, I don't think that person will need to be believing the lies spread about me or part of the Daughters of Magda to assume the worst about how I'm treating her. It also makes the hospital, which is the option "Tobias" is the least likely to have planned for in advance, almost as bad as those they probably planned for; people there are constantly on the look-out for that kind of thing.  
A door-knocking indicating the arrival of one of their regular guests put off any further discussion of patrol-escaping plans until later.

xxxx

Magda day came, and Runa's hospital room was continuing to look like the safest option. As Sune was preparing himself and "Janine" to be taken there by Sigrun, someone knocked at the door. When Sigrun opened, she found Tanja, her regular bodyguard and a very tired-looking Runa. After all mage-eyes present confirmed they were who they seemed to be, Tanja explained:  
-The family that I usually "happen to be visiting" on Magda day recently found a crowd they like and are going to its park gathering this year. I thought this household would make a good new protectorate, considering how it came into existence. Someone needed Runa's hospital room more urgently than she did, and I owe Rolf a favor. Let's hope nobody will expect her to be so close to both her actual home and the orphanage in which she lived for a few months.  
Daniel agreed, under the condition that all members of the household that didn't already have other plans for the day help keep an eye on the guests. The good news was that Tanja was unknowingly a deterrent for "Tobias" due to having easy access to some of the rare means of quickly incapacitating a mage if one was stupid enough to use their powers to blatantly break the wrong law right in front of her eyes. The bad news was that Sigrun, Helena and the housekeeper of uncertain loyalties were going to be the guests' only watchers who were both physically and mentally adults; Daniel, Emil and Lalli already had plans, though the latter would probably be grateful for an excuse to stay in the house. It had taken Markus promising that this particular crowd was among the quieter ones, if not actually the quietest, to convince Lalli to come at all. While Daniel has doubts about Markus' standards for quietness, he hadn't been able to argue against "All the boring faiths who have followers on our side are there, how loud can it be?". On the subject of Markus, the latter wasn't going to be awake for at least another two hours, so Daniel though he might as well go back to his own bed in the meantime.

xxxx

When Daniel came to his senses after having been given Emil's tea, he was surrounded by the rest of the household and the guests, who were in the middle of having breakfast. Tanja was in the middle of having a sign language conversation with "Janine":  
-Very nice work, the two of you. I've actually met parents of mute or deaf children who refuse to learn this. She's even doing a little _too_ well for a child her age. Do you have anything to do with this, Princess?  
Helena replied:  
-What I can tell you really depends on what Runa already knows about her. I don't want to be the one mentioning things that she's not supposed to know yet.  
Runa intervened with a voice that was a much less sleepy than upon her arrival, but still indicated that whatever rest she had gotten wasn't enough:  
-I noticed the child was found right around the time Prince Emil was found. I'm guessing Lady Vivian could have lied when she claimed the Princess is the girl's mother. If that's the case, I like that you don't seem to be using this as an excuse for mistreating her in any way. If there is _another_ secret about that child though, it probably shouldn't be discussed around me. Hey, Daniel, have you had enough food to be able to handle something you probably don't want to hear yet?  
Given his plans for the day, he was at a fairly high risk for this happening anyway.  
-Try me.  
-I noticed a couple of Daughters of Magda patrols getting ready from the carriage on the way here. I'm quite sure I saw Alicia in one of them.  
This was the fact that had come back to the forefront of Daniel's mind when Sune had voiced the possibility that one of the Royals could potentially cooperate with the Daughters of Magda. Alicia had apparently gotten her hands on a piece of propaganda that had persuaded her that it was some kind of miracle that she had yet to be sexually abused by some adult in the orphanage, forced into wearing men's clothing and forbidden from ever considering men as possible romantic partners. Markus' attempt to have a serious conversation on the subject had quickly been dismissed as an attempt to "recruit" her. Having been fourteen at the time of the incident, she had been old enough to become a novice Daughter of Magda. This was going to be the first Magda day during which Alicia and Markus were going to be on different teams, after years of being siblings.

xxxx

Markus, who had this morning turned out to own another outfit besides his guard uniform after all, reacted to Emil's contribution to their conversation by looking at him as is he had grown a second head:  
-How in the world did you live here until age sixteen and not find this out until your in-laws in Finmi told you about it? Did those parents of yours keep you under a rock or something?  
Emil fortunately had a ready-made response for that kind of question:  
-You've actually kind of got it. My parents were kind of protective, and we lived in an area where reaching out had too much of a risk of getting me the wrong kind of "help". It's one of the reasons why I'd really like to see those short plays you mentioned to convince us to come.  
To Emil's relief, Markus welcomed the change in subject:  
-I really like the theater troupe putting on the plays. It's actually one of the ones I'm hoping to join if someone leaves or they can afford to hire a new person.  
Emil was a little surprised:  
-I don't think I realized this was one of the jobs you were aiming for. Do you have any experience in acting?  
-Did it a lot when I was younger. I ended up learning how to fight because of the roles I tended to prefer. It's easier to find a guard job than an acting job, so I'm keeping both options open for the job that will let me leave the orphanage.  
Emil was about to ask Markus why he just didn't get hired by Daniel as an extra guard, when he realized that keeping all of them in his house, even with most of them having a job to do, was probably already quite expensive. And two more people were going to be moving in any day now.

Emil's thoughts were interrupted by a leaflet being shoved in front of his face. As he regained awareness of his surroundings, he noticed that the leaflet was held by a hand, which belonged to a young woman who seemed to be around fifteen years old. Her hair was of an orange-ish shade of blonde, her hair style a slightly longer version of simple bangs and chin-length hair Emil and Sune had both adopted independently, her outfit a white sleeveless tunic over a longer-sleeved dress. The dress was dyed of a blue so light that it could have been mistaken for white if that weren't the tunic's actual color. He feet were in simple sandals. Daniel had recommended to Emil to keep all leaflets handed to him, even those that he knew in advance he was unlikely to agree with, so he would get an idea of what people were being told by whom. Helena had also pointed out that it also made one less leaflet that could end up in the hands of someone who was either ignorant about the subject or having doubts about whatever they had been taught about it as a child. Emil took the leaflet, and the young woman stepped aside to let him and Lalli, who had been timidly walking behind him, pass. It was only then that Emil noticed that there were two older women nearby, wearing a more elaborate version of the younger one's clothes. Dresses dyed a darker blue, a blue cloth belt around the waist and the tunics sporting a shoulder-covering collar. Emil's brain finally caught onto to the fact that they had just run into a patrol made of a novice and two confirmed Daughters of Magda. Daniel was having a conversation with one of the older women, while Markus was waiting on the other side of the pseudo-blockade the women were forming, and meticulously shredding a leaflet similar to the one Emil was currently holding. Emil went to join Markus and showed Daniel with his chin:  
-How long is he going to take? And isn't hearing out the representatives of most citizen organizations Randi's job?  
Markus sighed while continuing his paper-tearing:  
-Not too long, hopefully. They are persuaded that there is some kind of long-forgotten magic spell that can be used to easily "cure" whatever they think is wrong with us, and that it would be quickly be found again if they could get a mage the King will listen to on their side. Fortunately, we live in times in which the councilor of wisdom is a long shot, so that leaves basically all other mages who visit the palace on a regular basis.  
Emil had to make a great effort to stifle a snicker for a few moments, while feeling a little bad for Daniel. When they had met of on the way to the gathering, Markus had greeted them all sounding like he was coming down with a cold, prompting Daniel to pull his medical diagnosis talisman out. It had turned out that Markus wasn't coming down with a cold, but was rather starting to show the effects of an arrangement between himself and Daniel. Emil had remembered Sylvia once mentioning that people in her situation sometimes get their bodies changed by magic, but that she wasn't interested in doing so herself. A quizzical voice interrupted Emil's thoughts:  
-Marta? What happened to your voice?  
The orange-haired novice was the one who had spoken, and her shift in location since the last time Emil had paid any attention to her suggested she was addressing someone in their group rather than any of her superiors. Markus answered her without detracting from his paper-shredding:  
-Just following along on my plan to change various things that cause people to make wrong assumptions, which I'm quite sure I've told you about multiple times. The voice is just the beginning.  
When the young woman next spoke, she was quite obviously trying to keep herself from shouting and not quite managing it:  
-Your voice was _completely fine_ before! Now you just sound like you're sick! And whoever you tricked into helping you with this is…  
A look of realization suddenly appeared on the young woman's face, and she promptly turned her attention to Daniel's direction:  
-Daniel, how could you do this? You're giving advice to the _King_ now, you can't be going along with Marta's games on the side.  
Daniel answered her:  
-Sorry Ali, but if you haven't understood this isn't some kind of elaborate game yet, I'm afraid I don't have any explanation that will please you.  
The incident at least had the merit of making the woman who was talking with Daniel promptly end the conversation and let him go.

As soon as they were out of the group's hearing range, Markus confirmed that the orange-haired novice was his and Daniel's younger sister Alicia, whom Runa had mentioned just this morning. Emil couldn't help being intrigued:  
-Then why did she tell you all that mean stuff? I thought that a child who grew up around you would be in good position to understand your situation.  
The face Markus made told Emil he had asked him a sensitive question. Markus took a few moments before answering:  
-I did my best to make my younger siblings understand what was going on and answer any question they had for me at the time, and it worked with Dirk – that's our younger brother – but not Alicia. She didn't take the changes it involved well. A lot of Daughters of Magda propaganda claims that there is something objectively wrong about those changes and that they should be fought against. It reached her much better than anything I could tell her.  
Emil processed what he had been told before asking the next question that came to his mind:  
-Is there anything Lalli and I can do if something like that happens again? Nobody ever did this to Sylvia, at least not while I was around.  
-For starters, just correct any incorrect names and pronouns she uses. Daniel and myself are trying different approaches because we know her a little better and using the same method for too long without getting any visible results can get tiring.  
Emil answered with an understanding nod. As they continued walking to their destination, he couldn't help but give a quick glance in the direction they had come from at the thought that this young woman could be one of the people Tobias could eventually choose to hurt or take hostage if they deemed it necessary.

They quickly found the park, and space on one of the many cushions set in front of the makeshift stage just in time for the short plays to begin. Daniel briefly left between the two first and came back with what seemed to be a sweet pastry that Markus gladly accepted. He perked up enough to ask if there was any beer where the pastry had come from. Daniel reminded him that he was at the gathering partly to build a little reputation with the general public, and that he wasn't taking chances with Markus' ability to hold his liquor. Between them, the plays turned out to contain much more than Emil had ever picked up on their common subject matter, even accounting for facts that he had learned as Stig. They told the story of various groups disparaged by the Daughters of Magda, including their bumpy history of legal status and public acceptance. How there had been times where the only way they could meet each other in relative safety had been by partaking in other illegal or poorly viewed activities, or at least pretending to do so. How, beyond a certain age, they would be often living a double life in regards to a family that they had started for the sole purpose of keeping up appearances. That the current times were among the better they had had, but that there were still far too many people who assumed that anyone who was attracted to the same sex, or whose body didn't quite match with how they felt inside, would also systematically partake in those illegal and poorly viewed activities in addition to being unable to keep a steady romantic partner. Several factors also caused many to view any pairing that wasn't made of a man and a woman as some form of hostility towards pairings who were. This made it quite easy for the Daughters of Magda to persuade people that many of those who were part of the gathering would inevitably make terrible parents. In addition to this, parenting was already a challenging task on its own right and mistakes with long-term consequences happened just as often in families the Daughters of Magda didn't approve of as they did in families they approved of. Because of this, the Daughters of Magda could always find people who had had a bad experience being raised by a certain type of family if they cared to look for them, and present them as proof of their beliefs being correct. This was one of the many reasons there were still many otherwise decent people who saw nothing wrong with the patrols and various other activities of the Daughters of Magda.

The last play was about the Royal family, and chronicled various members of the line who were known or suspected to be interested in the same sex or nobody at all, and how they had been treated in their time. The line-up also included a couple people who had been in Sylvia and Markus' situation. One of the people whose story was told was Emil's own grandmother Mia, who had had her children extremely late in life due to the need of new heirs arising almost from one day to the next; her youngest, Torbjörn, had been born little before her sixtieth birthday. Before this, she had been the older unmarried cousin to a main Royal line that had had plenty of spares who were all siblings to each other. The competition between the siblings to make themselves look like a good future ruler had escalated to the point where one of them had set his mind on conquering Finmi. When the first sibling to have the idea had died, other siblings had tried finishing the job, only to succumb to their own bad decisions. Others had been smart enough to stay out of the conquest, but had ended up being choice hostages from Finmi people who wanted to pressure the would-be conqueror into giving up. Various miscommunications and clashing rescue attempts had resulted in many hostages dying, as well. When the truce with Finmi had been signed forty years ago, the Royal household had consisted of grandma Mia, her oldest son Torolf (who would grow up to become Emil's father) and councilor of magic Fredrik, without whom Mia wouldn't have been able to have children at such an old age; it was also apparently well-known that Councilor Fredrik was the father of Mia's sons on a more biological level. Once that story was finished, Emil expected the play to do the same. It took his own name being told on-stage for him to realize that what had happened to him from the perspective of most inhabitants of the country would definitely be worthy of being part of that play. Overall, Emil's own portrayal wasn't bad as he had briefly feared it to be. A few inaccurate assumptions had been made about Lalli, but they had been no different from those that Emil himself had made before getting to know him properly. The only aspect to really catch Emil unaware had been the brief depiction of Helena and Daniel's relationship, alongside the barely stifled laugh it got out of Markus. It consisted of Helena straight-up telling Daniel that she expected him to have his entire life come second to her summons, and that he could say goodbye to ever becoming part of the Council if he tried to do otherwise, while showing Daniel too smitten to see any problem with the arrangement.

Once the last play was over, Daniel decided that he and Markus would pay the troupe a visit, while Emil and Lalli walked around the park to get a general feel of the way it was set up before the "siege" started. Only Lalli was asked if he wanted Daniel and Markus to pass any message from him to the troupe, as Prince Emil was currently catatonic and being cared for at the palace as far as all but three of the people present in the park were concerned. Soon after they parted ways with Daniel and Markus, Emil decided to get a few thoughts he had off his chest:  
-So… What that play showed about Helena and Daniel… I wonder where they got that from.  
-It seemed about right to me.  
Now, Emil was even more bewildered than before:  
-What are you talking about?  
-Before the fire… I didn't realize Helena was supposed to become your wife when you became old enough. Tuuri talked much more about how the Western Region used to be a Kingdom named Vege and Helena's was the great-great-something-granddaughter of its last King. When I had to be somewhere else because Tuuri and Reynir needed the room, and Helena was visiting, I would sometimes hear Daniel and Helena talking in her room. There were two or three times where it was a lot like what they showed in the play.  
-But… I never saw them interact like this… even…  
Emil realized mentioning his very few memories of seeing Helena and Daniel interact before the palace fire – of which only one was vivid enough for him to be certain it actually happened – in public probably wasn't a good idea. Lalli fortunately provided him with the beginning of answer:  
-They could have been doing that thing where people pretend that things are better than they really are when other people are watching.

Emil didn't realize how close he and Lalli had come to one of the temporary stalls set up in the park before a cheerful voice greeted them:  
-Hello! Any questions to ask us? To save everyone time, the answer to "What are you doing here?" is "Please read our sign carefully and pay closer attention to our outfits".  
Emil was taken aback, but quickly saw how the blonde young teenager with her hair in two low pigtails could have deemed the statement necessary. At first glance, the outfit she was wearing could be mistaken for the one identical to Alicia's. Upon a closer look, the tunic was of a natural white rather than the shade that required bleaching the fabric, and the blue of the dress was just dark enough to be recognized as blue on its own. Next, he looked at the sign, that indicated that the stall belonged to an organization named "Sisters of Magda". Emil next realized that the outfit wasn't the only vaguely familiar thing about the young woman holding the stand. He looked at her more carefully, then turned to Lalli to get a second opinion. Lalli's answer was the last thing that could prove him wrong, and it failed to do so:  
-Yes, it's her.  
Emil's brain fortunately didn't take as long as it could have to tell him that discretion was probably the best option:  
-Hum… Unfortunately, we are in a hurry. Do you have a booklet or something you could give us? And it would be great if you could write directions to get to one of your temples from Councilor Street on the back.  
The young woman complied, and quickly handed Emil a booklet:  
-Here you go, sir. We have two siege songs. Their lyrics on the two last pages if you wish to sing them.  
Lalli suddenly seemed more alert than he had been so far:  
-Women are starting to surround the park. Twelve. Three on each side.  
That meant the "siege" had started and that Emil and Lalli needed to be on "guard duty". They had been warned to not under-estimate the Daughters in spite of the low numbers. While the Daughter of Magda numbers had dwindled while the number of gathering spots they needed to surround had increased within recent memory, both shifts had happened gradually enough for the Daughters to adapt. If a single child strayed out of the park before sundown, the Daughters _would_ catch it and make sure it didn't return to its parents on its own. They would next tell the city guard various half-truths in hope that one of them would result in the child getting taken away from its parents with backing from actual law enforcement.

Emil and Lalli quickly found a patch of the park's fence to guard. Lalli took the position that was closest to the Daughters of Magda watching that side of the park. Emil could still see them well enough to tell that the group of Daughters wasn't the one they had run into earlier. Emil pulled out the booklet, and looked at what Anna had written on the back in addition to the requested directions: _Call me Annika if we see each other again. Don't tell Sune._ He was going to need to think about this later. He found the double page with the song lyrics and focused on the first, assuming it would be the first to come up among the two. He turned to Lalli:  
-Sorry, this is part that may be a little hard for you. The Daughters of Magda are going to be signing and trying to convince children to come out of the park. People inside the parks will sing also. They can take breaks, but the signing is going to need to stay loud enough to cover up what the Daughters of Magda are saying until sundown. If anyone sees you leave, they will be imagining just about any reason possible besides just having trouble standing loud noises in general. If it gets really bad, you can use that spell that turns off your hearing and I will handle things for you until it fades away.  
From the corner of his eye, Emil saw a Daughter of Magda bring what was probably a sound-amplifying talisman near her mouth. On the stage that had been used for the plays, a chorus of children gathered and started signing, officially as the beginning of an amateur talent show. He hoped he would be able to keep things up until sundown.


	9. Magda Day: Afternoon

**Magda day: Afternoon**

The fact that the best combination of magical protection, vantage point and escape route was Helena and Sune's bed had interacted with Runa's low level of energy in a predictable way. "Janine" meanwhile, had apparently decided that pretending to play with her doll was the best way to kill time while keeping her eyes away from anything that might be relevant to Tobias. While Sune had trouble thinking of Tobias' mind as a separate entity from the man who had abused him and Helena, he also understood the need to keep his own mind open concerning previous faces Tobias could have worn; even the most basic assumptions could result in him discarding a good candidate without noticing. Thinking of that, this was probably a good time to dig up some of the historical knowledge he had and see if he could think of anyone who could fit the requirements that existed according to Helena. He tried for a few moments, but soon had to admit that he had trouble doing that alone. Reading a book about whichever subject he was reflecting on seemed to be the bare minimum for him to feel like he had another mind off which to bounce ideas. Maybe he could talk with Runa whenever her nap ended, if he could give her a good reason to be considering an oddly specific "hypothetical" scenario. "Janine" was an even worse sounding board for this. Sune suddenly realized that two cloaked figures were coming down the street and slowing down as they approached the small path between the street and the entrance to Daniel's mansion. He woke Runa up and put "Janine" in her lap as soon as she sat on the bed:  
-People are coming. I'm going to listen to what I can from the top of the stairs.  
The good news was that the mansion's set-up would let Sune pick up what was going on downstairs with his good ear. The bad news was that any sound from the bedroom, if anything unexpected happened there, would be on his bad side.

Sune came near the stairs just in time to hear a knock on the door, Sigrun answering and a few exchanges he couldn't make out. He soon heard Helena's voice:  
-Sune, it's safe to come down. The girls can come also.  
He went to fetch Runa and "Janine", and the three of them came down the stairs. As soon as he saw the two people in the entry hall, he quickly understood how they had been cleared so quickly:  
-Mikkel! Reynir!  
Mikkel was the only one of the two Sune knew well enough to both accept and give a hug. Reynir, meanwhile, was looking at "Janine" as if the fact that she existed was sinking in only now. Sune's attention turned back to Mikkel as he noticed him fumbling in his travel bag and taking out a neatly wrapped bundle:  
-This is from Alva.  
Helena grabbed the bundle before Sune could take it:  
-Sorry, but I'd rather make sure the contents are safe myself. Even if you had it in there all the time, we're not completely safe from some putting something in there after Alva made it.  
Helena went to the dining room, Reynir followed her:  
-If there turns out to be something in there I missed during my last check, I'd better learn how to look for it.  
As soon as Helena and Reynir left, Sune questioned Mikkel's choice of arrival time:  
-Did you actually plan to get here today? And if so, why?  
-The patrol blockers sometimes like having an imposing-looking man around regardless of actual fighting skills. I did enough stints with them to know exactly what paths to take to get almost anywhere in town without running into anyone on Magda day. I thought it might be a good idea to have as few people as possible witness our return.  
Sigrun seemingly showed up out of nowhere and gave Mikkel a good back slap:  
-And this is why I'm happy to have you here again! Talking about this, I already have something for you to do. We're keeping the kids in Helena and Sune's room, but we've been trying to keep enough capable adults to stop a "rescue party" downstairs. We could use an actual adult or two upstairs.  
Sune first wanted to protest, but had just experienced first-hand the limits of being the look-out with only one good ear. It was probably a good idea for him to grab "Janine" and… where was she? Reynir's voice coming from the dining room gave him the answer:  
-What's _with_ that kid?

Sune got into the dining room just in time to hear Helena tell Reynir that he would get explanations as soon as there would be fewer guests in the house. Sune noticed Tanja and her bodyguard were in the room as well, which made him realize he had lost track of Runa's location. Mikkel came into the room right after Sune:  
-I apologize for disturbing your work, but did you, Daniel or Lalli check Runa's state of health upon her arrival?  
Helena looked up from the handful of items she was examining:  
-She got discharged from the country's best hospital this morning, so I don't think it crossed anyone's mind. Tanja, was she actually examined by a mage before the two of you left?  
Tanja nodded:  
-She might as well be Rolf's own daughter, of course she was. But that poison was meant to kill her, so the cure wasn't entirely harmless either.  
-That makes sense. What kind of symptoms does she still have from the cure?  
-A rash on her shoulder. The mage who examined her said it was a quite common reaction to the medicine, put some balm on it and sent us on our way.  
-Oh no!  
Helena promptly sat up and only avoided bumping into Mikkel on the way to the entrance hall due to the latter stepping aside. Sune briefly wondered what could make Helena so worried, then his mind was hit with the possible significance of the rash. He remembered an entire week of being ill, baffling every single mage coming to examine him, and being the only one knowing that Tobias and Helena's claims of not knowing what was wrong with him were lies. He had "miraculously" recovered at the end of the week in question, after Tobias had somehow entered his guarded bedroom in the middle of the night and made him drink something while threatening to kill him if he ever told anybody about the visit. However, on the off-chance this was the answer, there were still a few questions. If he remembered correctly, Tobias had needed to inject something into him to make him catch the disease, and the rash that had heralded it had only appeared several days after the injection. If Helena's suspicions turned out to be correct, when, exactly, had Runa been contaminated? Sune now really wanted to check whether his suspicions were correct or not, and had to remind himself that unless he was called for, the most helpful thing he could do was stay out of the way.

A room with an adult-size bed had been set up on the ground floor on the off-chance that someone would come to seek help from one of the household's mages to heal something. Helena tucked Runa in as she explained the situation to her and Mikkel:  
-When I had to help "Tobias" making that artificial disease, I abused all the loopholes that came to my notice. One of the things I was able to do was keep the original pathogen's weaknesses, that will cause it to quickly decompose into innocuous elements outside of a specific set of circumstances that are absent from most methods of testing something for poison. If it was put in her in her kettle alongside the poison or in something that came into contact with her during her hospital stay, nobody would have noticed.  
Runa answered with a tired voice:  
-If it's a disease, did I make other people sick with it?  
Helena petted her head in an affectionate gesture:  
-It's meant to be given to chosen targets, so I was asked to make it as hard to transmit to other people as I could. And even if the conditions for transmission are met, it was based on a pathogen to which half the population of Scandi and Finmi is immune. Tobias also made me work on the cure, so I know what it is.  
-Tobias has been dead for weeks. Who besides you would make me sick?  
During all this time, Helena had been dreading the idea of Tobias putting in place plans that she was now supposed to be the only mage alive to know about. It took her a few moments to remember what she was planning to tell people asking questions:  
-I've heard of some of Tobias' work ending up in the market of the dead. I guess some people bought copies, and one of them has their mind set on incapacitating you.  
-You are live in an ex-lover's house, few people are going to give you a real job, and you are expected to provide for a couple of children. Are you sure you're not the one selling that stuff to people?  
Rolf had taught that girl well. The magical version of the cure required a custom talisman, and the focus to make one. Helena briefly cursed the circumstances that had made her able to focus under such emotional stress that being directly accused of being responsible for Runa's condition by Runa herself was easy to handle by comparison.  
-Yes, I am. And I can start working on properly curing you as soon as you stop asking questions.

xxxx

The cure had taken more energy out of Helena than planned, and she had decided she needed a nap right afterwards. She had also insisted upon having the nap in the same room as Runa, who had fallen asleep as well. This left Sune with only Mikkel, who had agreed to the "baby-sitting" positing, to talk to. He suddenly realized that he had been hoping for such a situation for a couple of days:  
-There's been something I've been wondering about. But I don't feel comfortable asking about it to anyone here.  
-Go ahead.  
-I've never felt… "attracted" is the word, I think… to anyone without being under the effect of a "love pill". I've been reading what I could find about them, and why they aren't given to children. One book I found claimed that if a child is given love pills and only ever set their eyes on a certain type of person while it's in effect, it ends up being what they are attracted to when they get older.  
Mikkel sighed:  
-First of all, I'd suggest making sure whatever you're reading is written by someone who knows what they are talking about before you start studying the passage about "love pills". You can bet that people who have a very narrow idea of what kind of attraction is natural frequently blame those pills for the existence of everything they don't approve of. But saying that this book _has_ to be wrong concerning the consequences such an experience had _on you specifically_ wouldn't be quite right either. Is it something you noticed? Or something you are afraid will happen in the future?  
-The second one. Right now, at least. It's a little hard to live here without being reminded that people can get interested in all sorts of other people, and I've been wondering what it would be like for me if Helena and I ever manage to let go of each other.  
Mikkel gave Sune a brief pat on the head:  
-Well, this is much more optimism about your future love life than last time I tried to breach the subject with you.  
Come to think of it, Mikkel was right. While he still had doubts about whether he and Helena would ever be able to lead separate love lives, the prospect seemed to have appeared on his horizon sometime in the past few weeks. Just as he was thinking this, he noticed Runa opening her eyes:  
-Were the two of you just talking about something? Would you mind including me?  
Sune was relieved when Mikkel pretended that they had been talking about something else entirely, and came up with a conversation subject to which both Runa and Sune could contribute.

xxxx

Emil hoped that the parents of at least one of those children would show up soon. Three was the maximum number he could wrangle at the same time, and Lalli had needed to make himself deaf a while ago to keep the singing from putting him into a complete daze. One of the children ran towards a woman coming in Emil's direction, and they two of them left together without any sign of the woman noticing someone else had just been watching her child. Little after, Emil heard a voice calling a name repeatedly, and one of the kids ran into its direction yelling "daddy". The remaining child, a girl who couldn't be older than five, promptly looked around, and started crying. As he was trying calm her down, Emil realized that he could hear other young children crying, and gave the sky a quick glance to see the sun was starting to make its way to behind the city's buildings. Considering the time of the year, this meant it was past the time at which most children ate, and getting onto the time at which they were put to bed. Emil then felt foolish for having completely forgotten the reason for which the gathering was to last until sundown: past this time, actively keeping people from returning to their home without a good reason was a legitimate reason for arrest. It was one of those laws whose enforcement could depend largely on the guard's mood, but the people being prevented from returning home including parents with children crying from exhaustion tended to no play in the favor of the guilty party. Especially if the guilty party refused to leave on their own unless the child was given to them. Emil's attempts to calm the child down continued being fruitless, when Lalli poked his shoulder, then pointed towards the stage. Not only was it empty, but nobody seemed about to get on it. Emil picked up the little girl and walked towards the stage, fast enough to make good time, slowly enough that she or her parents would have time to notice each other if he chanced upon them on the way. It unfortunately turned out to not be the case. As soon as he was on the stage, a few people noticed their presence, which resulted in other people wondering why the people next to them had tuned toward the stage. Soon enough, a man was making his way towards the stage as fast as he could:  
-Mona!  
-Uncle!  
By the time the man got to the bottom of the stage, a woman had joined him from another part of the park. Little Mona was pleased to see her, as well, and she turned out to be her mother. The girl's uncle and mother thanked Emil, and the uncle stretched his arms just high enough for Emil to give him the girl. As he was about to get off the stage himself, Emil noticed that the Daughters of Magda who were facing the stage had witnessed what had just happened as well, and had gone silent in the process. One of them seemed to realize that the signing had died down, and brought the sound-amplifying talisman to her mouth to start speaking. Fortunately, people inside the park noticed and started singing again. As he came down the stage, Emil briefly wondered what they had made of the event, and how it would reflect on the gathering. A hand he didn't immediately recognize grabbed his shoulder from behind:  
-Here you are! Is Lalli anywhere nearby?  
Emil recognized Markus' voice. Emil turned as to face him and realized he was alone:  
-He's closer to the park's edge. Weren't you supposed to stick with Daniel in case someone assumed he was here _only_ for the publicity?  
-Whatever they taught him at that school, it didn't include a better idea of his limits. He's sleeping a few protective spells off in the infirmary tent and handful of people who know what magic exhaustion looks like are making sure nobody is bothering him. I'm not sure how we are going to make it back to his place, but I thought getting my hands on you and Lalli would be a good start. Great idea for finding that kid's guardians, by the way.  
Both of them headed in the direction in which Emil had last left Lalli.

As people were starting to leave the park, Anna changed into street clothes and wrapped the Sister of Magda novice outfit that signaled her as one of their volunteers into a bundle. She bolted into an alleyway near the park, only to come face to face with someone. The young man was wearing some sort of uniform. The feathered cap, the jacket and the pants were all of a color that couldn't decide whether it was dark pink, red, or light purple. His hair color seemed undecided between a dark golden blond and light brown, as well. A leather bag was resting on his hip, its strap diagonally traversing his chest from his shoulder. Anna was the first to speak:  
-May I ask what you are doing here?  
-My sister joined the Daughters of Magda a few months ago, and this is the first time she's taking part in their Magda day activities. Someone I know saw her handing out leaflets near here, so I was hoping she would be among those holding the siege and I could make sure she gets back to her home without getting hurt.  
The young man looked like he was a little older than she was. The Sisters weren't lying when they told her that many people were equally ignorant about the Daughters and park gatherings.  
-This crowd is probably the most peaceful one you can find. Your sister isn't going to be here. They probably took her to Combatant's park.  
The young man looked at her wide-eyed:  
-Why would they take her so far away from her morning posting? It's on the other side of town!  
-There are people who have been deeply hurt by the Daughter of Magda or people sharing their beliefs. Deeply enough that they don't have any kind of sympathy left for them and have come to think that there is no such thing as being too harsh towards them. Combatant's park is where people in that situation tend to find kindred spirits on Magda day. Now, picture yourself as an experienced Daughter of Magda who wants to convince a novice that the people that they are forcing into parks once a year can't be simply allowed to live their lives. Do you show her this park, or do you show her Combatant's park?  
-Combatant's park, I guess.  
A look of worry crossed the young man's face:  
-Those are the people who could hurt her just for being part of the Daughters of Magda, aren't they? I need to go there now!  
Anna realized she could help him:  
-I work in the palace, and usually need to sneak out to do my volunteer work. If you promise to not tell anybody else, I'll show you passage that will let you cut through the palace grounds and get to Combatant's park faster.  
The hopeful expression now on the young man's face made the offer worth it:  
-You would really do that? Thanks a lot!  
Both of them headed in the palace's direction.

Tanja had to spend a few moments pinching the ridge of her nose to fully process the implications of what Helena had just told her. Her explanation of who could have made Runa sick had passed the "too crazy to be made up" threshold a while ago. The fact that Helena _also_ refused to tell her who Tobias was masquerading as could have been suspect, if it weren't for the fact that Tanja could actually see quite a few people about whom she would prefer to keep such a fact close to her chest. She was now trying to convince Helena that naming that person was in her best interest before needing to return to her quarters in the palace. She fortunately saw a crack in which she could wedge herself:  
-Tell me, what happened to the mind of the person Tobias is impersonating? If it's anything that could be considered murder, you are now refusing to disclose the name of a murder victim you are aware of.  
-Then I'm allowed to keep my mouth shut. Weren't you finding Janine to be quite capable for a child her age just this morning? Myself and Daniel are that person's best chances of having things get back to normal, and they know how an actual two-year-old – even a fairly placid one – is supposed to behave. We both have interest in playing mother and daughter in the meantime.  
It was now even less of a wonder that Reynir had been baffled upon handling the child for the first time. The more Tanja found out about the situation, the more she saw why the household was keeping it under wraps and had concocted a cover "real story" to feed the rumor mill. She was going to need to sleep on the situation, and figure out what to do about it.

Almost as soon as Tanja realized that Randi had probably known of the _real_ situation all this time, she heard a set of knocks on the front door. Helena got up from the cushion on which she had been sitting to open it and reveal Randi herself:  
-I ran into four young men I believe to belong to your household on the way back from festivities. A couple of them looked a little too tired to walk the way back. I think the two who can still stand will appreciate some help unloading them.  
Helena called Sigrun and Mikkel, and the three of them headed outside. Randi, meanwhile, let herself in like a regular guest and noticed Tanja's presence:  
-It's late, even for Magda day. I thought the three of you would have left by now.  
-Runa is staying here tonight and I was about to leave with Inge. I'm just now realizing that your carriage big enough to bring all three of us back to the palace.  
An expression of relief crossed Randi's face as she clasped her hands together:  
-Would the two of you really come with me? I did pick those four up in part so I would be doing some of the trip back to the palace with company.  
Tanja realized that she had to perfect opportunity to confront Randi about a pattern she had noticed over the past few weeks:  
-Randi, would you please tell me what's happening? You've all but broken up with Vivian, and since then you've been like a scared little girl when it comes to her. I'm also aware that you've come to sleeping here from time to time.  
Randi suddenly got very interested in her clasped hands:  
-I wish I could tell you. But it would entail giving you information you may have trouble _not_ using for your own gain. There are other people in on what it is, so I'm managing.  
Tanja let out a sigh of relief. Whoever Tobias was impersonating, the chances of it being Randi were slim. If it had been the case, Helena would have definitely refused her as a regular guest in the very place to which she had moved to avoid living in the palace. If she could discard the third person who was supporting Anna as the future heir, this would make the two powerful people with whom Tanja needed to cooperate safe. It didn't take Tanja long to realize that Vivian being the person Tobias was masquerading as made sense of a dizzying number of things that she had noticed over the past few weeks. Randi had a point, however: neither she nor any of the household's permanent residents needed to know Tanja had figured it out.

As she got back into the Royal Wing, Anna walked by Emil's room. A lot had happened during the day, and Emil was the only person of the family she could tell about her volunteering. Under his bed had also turned out be a great place to hide the clothes belonging to "Annika".  
-Lalli and his husband were at the park today. The recognized me. I told them to not tell Sune… damn, they probably told Councilor Daniel or Helena by now. I also met a boy on the way back.

Tobias leafed through the orphanage's records, and found someone who matched the young man Anna had described while thinking she was talking _only_ to her semi-catatonic cousin. Dirk, fifteen years old, currently trying out working for the Royal Post. A "twin sister" who had effectively joined the Daughters of Magda as a novice, even though she was officially noted as having decided to do an extra month of internship more than six months in a row. Tobias had already heard of her via the means of surveillance they had in Daniel's household. The true owner of their current body hadn't been forthcoming as to whether Anna had started that volunteering activity on her own, or if any of the three Councilors who wanted to see her on the throne had encouraged her in some way. All three of them would have definitely seen benefits in having Anna spend some time with the Sisters of Magda. Once again, Tobias couldn't help but wonder what Frederick would say if he saw the teams that had formed behind each of his grandchildren, with the men within the Council supporting Håkan and the women within the Council supporting Anna. Things were more diverse among their other supporters within the court, but they were hard to keep straight due to some changing their mind depending on what the rumor mill had produced over the last day or two. Hopefully, Rolf would get tired of trying to talk Håkan out of wanting possessions from the other side of the world and start supporting Anna instead. The next step in Tobias' plan was going to require one of the two princelings still in the running to have minority support within the Council.

xxxx

Several days had passed, and Helena still had trouble figuring out whether Tobias had planned for Runa to get sick with that artificial disease while under the same roof as her or not. She wasn't quite sure she was safe from Daughters of Magda showing up after having caught up on a backlog, either. This came on top of having to pretend to not know of Anna's double life around Sune. Not to mention that Mikkel's cooking made her quite close to agreeing with Randi's stance on the balance between avoiding spies and having competent servants. And now, the household's source of good tea was going to be away for part of the day, as well. She was more than grateful for the possibility of making a nest out of the dining room's unused sitting cushions. If she was wasn't already exhausted by all the things she needed to keep track of, Helena would be seriously considering learning to cook and make tea herself. The only good news was that now that Sofia was away, they no longer needed to pretend "Janine" needed any kind of surveillance when there weren't any outside guests. The fact that Daniel couldn't go to the market of the dead, meanwhile, meant that Helena had a somewhat solid counter-argument in case her mind suddenly decided to start claiming she wasn't being much use to the household outside of telling Emil things Daniel knew just as well as she did. Her mind drifted towards the fact that Reynir was a rather odd addition to Emil's support circle. The two of them being part of the same group fleeing Scandi, then ending up living under the same roof, was one thing. Coming back to Scandi to be by his side when they seemed to share neither a friendship nor a language was another. Since Reynir was also in the room, she dredged up enough Shared Tongue to ask Reynir the question. Reynir gladly answered:  
-Onni is extremely cautious about who he lets into his spirit realm safe area. It took me a good couple years to be considered as trustworthy as Lalli and Cecilia. In such circumstances, it was easier to just have me be the messenger between Saimaa and Scandi when the operations would move back here. And to be honest, many of the things people do to avenge the death of a loved one don't feel suited to me. But I don't like the idea of doing nothing at all about it, either. Helping Emil with what he's trying to do feels like a good compromise.

As soon as Emil saw the location of his stand, he understood why it was among the handful of spaces given to newly licensed merchants. He didn't even have to tempt fate to make things worse, as both the Daughters of Magda stall and the Sisters of Magda stall had a young woman with a familiar face assisting an older superior. Mikkel, who had come to help him carry his merchandise, quickly saw the problem:  
-There are the rules I remember about this kind of situation. Before you build enough of a customer base, neither you nor your neighbors are allowed to ask you to be moved. The Planner may choose to move you on his own accord, but he rarely does this unless he _really_ wants a new stall to fail due to people being unable to find it in the same place on different days. If a fight requiring the Planner's attention erupts, it's up to the Planner whether the first strike was an actual first strike or an excuse used to "retaliate". I'd say that one thing you have going for you is that more people will be understanding if you choose to be more friendly to the Sisters than to the Daughters.  
Emil decided to walk toward the empty stall, his steps slightly slanted to the right as to be closer to the Sisters of Magda stall as he put his pack on the worn counter:  
-Oh, hi Annika. Didn't expect to see you here. I just got my merchant's license and this is the space I'm stuck with until I get somewhat of a customer base.  
-It's nice see you… I apologize, but I'm afraid I forgot your name.  
Emil played along, as he realized that if she did remember his name, she would have learned it while being served tea at the palace.  
-I'm Stig.  
He gave a quick glance towards the pair on the other side of his stall, which consisted of Alicia and the woman who had been talking with Daniel a few days earlier, before addressing Anna again:  
-By the way, no need to skirt around the place where you met me around those two. The one with orange-ish hair almost shoved a leaflet into my face while we were walking to the park the other day.  
Anna nodded, and Emil introduced himself to the older Sister of Magda holding the stall while he and Mikkel made the standard-issue bunch of wood and fabric that had come with the space presentable. Once they were done, Mikkel left to go about his own day. Almost as soon as Mikkel left, Alicia addressed Emil:  
-May I ask you a question?  
-You can. Whether you get an answer or not will depend on the question, though.  
-How well do you know Daniel?  
-As well as I can having lived in his house for the past few weeks.  
-I've heard rumors about him having an affair with a betrothed woman a few years ago. Do you know whether it's actually true or not?  
-It's true. I was friends with the woman with whom he had the affair before I ever met him.  
A look of disappointment crossed Alicia's face:  
-Getting away from that orphanage was an even better idea than I thought. Wait, if he really did have that affair, how did he ever get into that magic school on the Isle? What kind of high-standards magical school lets someone like that in?  
-I've never had any reason to discuss that school with him, so I don't know.  
-Fair enough. Did you have a chance to read the leaflet I gave you?  
-I did, and I'm not interested in what you have to offer. Actually, if I ever do get interested in Lady Magda's teachings, I think I'm more suited for the Sisters' way. Now, if you don't mind, I have a few things to set up if I want to make any money today.  
After getting the tea out, Emil arranged the hair dye he had from lightest color to the darkest. Anna's superior, whose hair was quite obviously greying, looked at it and seemed to have her interest sparked:  
-I happen to know someone who would be very interested in black that won't damage her scalp if you have any.  
Emil shook his head:  
-I did try to make black, and the result is still decorating a wall in my in-laws' workroom. Between that and the darkest colors I _could_ make without too much trouble not selling in Finmi, I gave up trying. I'm currently wearing the darkest color I can safely make, in case your acquaintance is willing to settle for anything a little lighter.  
The chat with Anna's superior continued, and it turned out to be a magnet for people who were hoping to gather some info by listening to the conversation of others. In the lot, several were interested in Emil's merchandise. Alicia and her superior tried to discourage people from buying, but the few that even noticed ignored them, one person outright questioning the reasons they gave to not buy from Emil. Another person strongly advised him to get a few magic protection spells for the stall as, according to them, there was a high chance of something happening to it in the next few days, if not overnight.


	10. The drum-player

**Note:** Heads up, there's a mini misgendering fest near the end of the chapter.

 **The drum-player**

It was the week during which orphans performed plays in the orphanage's garden. The set of stories on which the plays were based was one that Helena appreciated, and the house's roof was a decent location from which to watch whatever was going on in the area of the garden in which plays were held. It had been a genuinely enjoyable activity for the two first evenings and four first plays, but the second play of the third evening – the story given to nine-year-olds – had become unbearable. It told of a time when even having an official "toy" who didn't leave the sleeping quarters would have been unthinkable for a King who preferred men or a Queen who preferred women, which meant that the same-sex lover had to be met in secret. The story currently being performed by the children included an accomplice who had taken to practice playing drums not too far away from the meeting place to cover any noises that would garner unwanted attention. Considering the age of the performers, the beat played had every reason to be whatever the child portraying the drum-player could manage to play consistently. However, Helena found the beat to be way too close to the one "Tobias" had regularly played in the confines of their secret workroom to be a coincidence. The only reason she was sure it hadn't taken her hours to realize this was that the play still seemed to still be going on; the young age of the performers also meant is was only about half the length of most plays. If she had been "Tobias" and not wanted her and Sune to watch the play, she would have done something similar. Once whatever the sound of that drum was going to her would fade away, she would need to get her hands on a copy of the original story. She tried to figure out how she could get quick and relatively discrete access to a copy. Damn. She was going to have to ask Markus.

Emil would have sworn that there had been other people on the roof besides him and Lalli when the play had begun. He had noticed Helena and Sune leaving, but where had Markus, "Janine" and Runa gone? Markus had taken "Janine" on his lap when her _de-facto_ parents had left so she could continue watching, so Emil and Lalli should have ended up with the child if Markus had needed to leave for a reason that was only his own. If something had happened, he wasn't sure what to make of the fact neither he nor Lalli had been considered worth bothering over it. He also realized that the play was definitely over and that going back inside and actually asking people what was going on was a better idea than staying on the roof and overthinking it. As he and Lalli came down to where Helena and Sune's room was, they found the door shut and the "do not disturb" sign they made a lot of use of hanging from a nail on the door. Mikkel was found on the ground floor's "sick room", Runa in the bed and "Janine" in a small nest of pillows. Emil decided to enquire while Lalli gave "Janine" a closer look:  
-What happened?  
-Runa has a bad headache and Janine was signing for "hurting" and touching her head before falling unconscious. Markus is the one who noticed Janine wasn't well and brought her down, so I have no idea whether she really was unable to be more precise or trying to avoid acting older than her apparent age.  
-Did you ask Daniel about it?  
-He isn't here, but should be soon. He's been slipping out to who-knows-where while all of you are watching the play and letting the black-market King use his room with a closed door and curtains so it would sound like someone is working in there. Whatever he's up to, he's been able to time it so he's back little after the end of the second play yesterday and the day before.  
Just as Mikkel was finishing his sentence, Lalli suddenly looked in the general direction of Daniel's room:  
-He's back now, and the other man is leaving.  
At least, Emil no longer needed to ask Lalli whether he was aware Daniel had been sneaking out or not. After a short detour that Emil assumed to be to check on Helena and Sune, Daniel came to the sick room, looking tired:  
-I'm seriously thinking of suggesting to those two to go back to Finmi right now. I'm starting to think "Tobias" intentionally arranged to be able torment them even if they escaped. Both of them were familiar with the drum-player's beat. I also found what I was looking for in the orphanage.  
Mikkel apparently made a relevant connection before Emil could:  
-I thought you might not be going very far. And this week is indeed a good time to search it. Sorry to ask you this now, but there are two other people to examine here. It took a good while longer, but they don't seem to have responded to that play very well either.  
Daniel examined "Janine" first:  
-Whatever happened to her happened a little too long ago for me to pinpoint the cause. It looks like she just needs to rest, but I wouldn't be surprised if "Tobias" had arranged for those artificial bodies to respond to specific stimuli.  
Daniel next examined Runa, and Emil could have sworn Daniel's eyes widened:  
-I'm hope I'm reading things incorrectly, but it looks like her control talisman was briefly activated in the last hour.  
It was impossible for Emil to not respond to that:  
- _What_ control talisman?  
Daniel turned towards Emil and raised an eyebrow:  
-Did you ever wonder who else besides the Royals could be getting them or why I learned the means of extracting them in the first place when I had no idea that you would need it before I set foot in Scandi?  
Emil had to admit he hadn't, but it still didn't entirely answer his question:  
-So, why does _Runa_ have one anyway?  
-All children who grew up in the orphanage do. Rolf may have changed his mind about Runa a few months after leaving her there, but she did undergo the standard procedure for a new infant resident. And in case you're wondering, it's going to be a very bad idea to do anything about Markus and Dirk's as long as they're still living there and Alicia is still technically under its guardianship for the next three years.  
Emil was about ask more specifically for the reason those control talismans had been put inside the orphans' heads, he realized the reason the person actually ruling the country would have to do this, and that there was a more pertinent question to ask:  
-Do these talismans stay inside children after they leave?  
-Good thinking. They do, unless they are properly extracted. I was hoping to get Niels rid of his. "Tobias" seems to have gotten rid of Vivian's at some point. This makes Kenneth is the only member of the Council we need to watch out for in that respect. Runa will be fine for tonight, from what I can tell.

xxxx

Emil had trouble going to sleep that night. Daniel and Helena had told him multiple times that while the charity work done by the Council members existed for their good public images, people got real help in the process. Now, he had discovered that all former orphanage children were effectively a secret army that Vivian could have raised any time she wanted; and that by impersonating her, "Tobias" had gained access to it. Just as he finally felt like he was falling asleep, Emil realized Daniel hadn't shared _what_ he had found in the orphanage. The room's window opened, and Lalli came inside:  
-You're awake. Good. You can help. Go on top of the stairs and keep the others from coming down if they wake up.  
If there was one thing Lalli had gotten him used to, it was a situation turning out to be much more serious than he had first thought.  
-Mikkel is already down there. What's happening?  
-I'm not sure. It's only been described to me. But something weird is happening to Runa. I think I know how to make her better, but it takes a little time and can't be interrupted.  
-Go ahead and do it now, then. I'll be right behind you.  
Lalli was already downstairs by the time Emil got hold of the top bannister.

Who was this person? She didn't know them. They were speaking, but she didn't understand a single word. Why were they grabbing her? She needed to bite something. Might as well be strange person's arm. There was a new presence in the room. She heard something that vaguely sounded like singing, but she didn't recognize the words. Her head was hurting again. She was tired again. When did the strange man holding her change into Mikkel?

-This is impossible! The only real proof we have that humanity ever had to deal with that disease is the incredibly high number of people who are immune to it even now. The only reason members of our family still know those spells is that every generation manages to produce someone who's utterly convinced that the thing can come back anytime centuries after being completely wiped out.  
Reynir had trouble believing those last words were coming from Onni himself, whom he had contacted through the spirit realm. If someone in the family was going to teach Onni's future children seemingly obsolete knowledge for the sake of being cautious, it was definitely going to be him. Come to think of it, Reynir suspected something similar to have happened in his own family. This was however the kind of situation that required the conversation to stay on track:  
-Well, for what it's worth, what Runa described according to the others didn't exactly sound like the symptoms I've heard about.  
-The symptoms you're most likely to know of are those of being _slowly killed_ by the disease. But being immune and getting killed by it were not the only possibilities. There was a third one. Those who know of it suspect it's the real reason it managed to spread so much whenever it first appeared. Some sources claim some of those that caught the disease became some sort of very aggressive monster with an impulse to attack and bite any healthy human they find. One of the signs of infected people taking that route is becoming unable to recognize people they should be familiar with.  
That unfortunately rang a bell for Reynir:  
-Helena claimed to have cured Runa. What happened?  
-This is something you will have to ask Helena.

xxxx

Luck had it that there was no Council meeting next morning, leaving the household free to start the day early and enabling Runa to be present for the explanation of what had happened to her during the night. A sheep-herder turned party-trick mage not knowing about what had happened to her was one thing. The ignorance of Helena, who had claimed to have cured her almost three weeks ago, was disappointing but made some sort of sense, and in a way, lent credence to her claim of not having been the one to make her sick. Daniel was a little more unexpected. Runa had noticed a few changes in Markus when running into him; considering that gradual but steady changes could take some time to be noticeable, she had figured out that Daniel had to have something to do with them, and would have needed to learn a lot about how the human body worked to make them happen with minimal risk to Markus. Daniel had however managed to find what he wanted without reading anything about the disease that he didn't already know from the prior education Runa had also gotten. Those who died of it were known to develop structural anomalies in various part of their bodies, but Runa never hear anything about people outright changing into monsters. The conversation suddenly became very tedious when Daniel decided he needed to figure out a Scandi-language version of all the spells Lalli had been taught concerning the disease _right now_ and Lalli had turned out to also be the only person in the room with a decent grasp of both Finmi and Scandi. Runa's situation in regard to the disease was one Rolf would need to be made aware of as soon as she returned home. However, she really wanted one of the mages come with her, and all three of the ones she thought she could count on to explain things properly had invested themselves in the translation of the spells. Mikkel, Sigrun and Reynir all decided they weren't needed and went on to do whatever work they usually did in the household; Sune was already watching his daughter. Stig seemed to envy them a little. Helena had insisted that he stay on the basis that there were still a few idiosyncrasies in Lalli's Scandi that only he understood, but none had shown up yet. Runa sat next to him in hope that it would make both of them feel a little less lonely:  
-So… you got married to someone from Finmi and didn't bother to learn his language?  
The face he made told her he was having mixed feeling about having that conversation:  
-I tried, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. When he turned out have been picking up Scandi during the classes meant to teach me Finmi, we decided one shared language was good enough.  
-What are you doing about Janine, then?  
-Watching her sign with others as much as I can, and hoping I'll pick things up. And since she just plain can't speak, my inability to pick up on foreign languages comes across as easier to get past to everyone else.  
-Can't one of the mages fix whatever is keeping her from talking?  
-No. Very rare birth defect. Trying to fix it without knowing exactly what to do could mess up her breathing. Helena sometimes seems to be thinking about it, but I think she has too many other things on her plate properly focus on it.  
Runa remembered the thoughts that had gone through her head concerning the girl's origins, and decided to see if she could get any idea of which ones were going in the right direction:  
-Guess that's how Councilor Vivian had her around to pass off as Helena and Sune's child.  
Stig briefly looked surprised, before switching to a more caring expression:  
-Helena and Daniel keep telling me I should leave people wondering about as much things I can manage. But I couldn't help but notice that you seemed to like the possibility that Helena and Sune were caring for her despite not her being their daughter.  
Daniel and Markus were apparently better about not telling people more than they needed to know about her than Runa had been giving them credit for.  
-My mother meant to give birth to me in the orphanage and leave me there, but bad weather, a bad sense of orientation and her sense of what a "large building" was resulted in her giving birth in Master Rolf's spare bedroom instead. After handing me over to the orphanage, he decided to sponsor me, then kept leaving Lady Vivian notes saying I could call on him for just about anything I needed when I would be older. He ended just going ahead and adopting me before I turned a year old. Then he realized he was in charge of raising me and decided he might as well train me as his preferred successor. A surprising number of people I've met gave me a hard time for not being his biological daughter, or turned out to have been treating me kindly only because they had been assuming I was somehow related to him by blood.  
Stig was apparently looking for something to answer when Daniel's voice switched from a half-whisper to normal volume after what had to be the tenth variation of the same spell:  
-Oh, I think I've got it. I'm getting three different signals from the people within the house.  
Lalli confirmed it what he was supposed to see. Daniel continued:  
-There's a signal I'm getting from myself, you, Helena, Stig, Sigrun and Mikkel.  
Lalli explained those were the people who were immune. As it had turned that even the form of the disease Helena had helped Tobias create could be transmitted quite reliably via skin-breaking bites, Runa was relieved that none of the people who had dealt with her the previous night were at risk… until she realized Daniel _hadn't_ named the entire household.  
-There's another signal I'm getting from Reynir only.  
Lalli told his that was for the non-immunes who would die if they caught the disease. Runa realized what came next just as Daniel voiced it:  
-Guess the "will be turned into a monster if sick" signal is what I'm getting from Sune, Janine and Runa.  
Lalli simply nodded. Runa barely had time to piece together what that meant before Helena let out a sear word, asked for Sune and Reynir to come back to the dining room, and started to make plans for Runa to move into the house permanently. Reynir eventually managed to get a word in edgewise. It turned out his own family had been holding onto a few spells concerning the disease on a "just in case" basis, and one of them was intended to keep people from infecting each other out of sheer proximity.

xxxx

-According to Reynir, these otherwise work a lot like the sound-amplifying talismans used in theater performances. As long as they're in the face's general vicinity, they will work.  
The first piece of good news that had come with Reynir's knowledge was that Runa could return to her own home without being a risk to Rolf and their house employees. Helena was the one to explain Rolf the situation in his house's dining room, as Daniel had gone to deliver a few items to Randi's hospital. Rolf, with composure only someone with his experience in his job could manage, promptly reminded Helena of the other reason she had needed to come in person:  
-You told both of us you cured her on Magda day.  
Helena clenched her fists:  
-For all intents and purposes, I had. The spell I know doesn't cure the disease as much as make it dormant for the rest of the patient's life. Only time will tell if Lalli's spell _actually_ cured it or just made it dormant again. If not actually cured, it can be woken up again via magic if someone wishes to do so. I guess whoever first came up with the dormancy spell didn't consider that someone would actually want to reverse its effects.  
Runa was the one to ask the inevitable question:  
- _How_ would someone do such a thing?  
-Someone can do it as long as they can control your body remotely.  
After that answer from Helena, both her and Rolf agreed that given the circumstances, Runa might as well be told some of the things she would have found out anyway in a few years immediately. The control talismans inside whoever had ended up in the orphanage before turning three years old. Those inside the slaves sold on the black-market. Their possible double duty as cures for some conditions found both in Randi's hospital and Tanja's criminal rehabilitation center. The real reason Daniel was dragging his feet concerning the reopening of the "exchange program" inns Tobias had closed down. Runa and Rolf had no need to know about those inside the Royals, however.

By the time Daniel was near the orphanage again, the first lunch shift had started, which let him examine a large number of people from just outside the dining hall in spite of the limited range of the spell Lalli taught him. There were unfortunately too many people in the room for him to guess whether any of them were the two residents of the orphanage he cared about the most. He thought of the whole situation again, and still couldn't come up with a non-worrying reason "Tobias" would have chosen to make "Janine" susceptible to turning into a monster rather outright immune to the disease. This, combined with the handful of coffin-like boxes decorated with pieces of Moon marble he had found in one of the basement rooms, didn't bode well for "Tobias'" projects at all. The possibility of the plan being long-term meant there could still be time to thwart it, but was also bad news for the length of time during which Tobias was planning on impersonating Vivian.

When Daniel displaced himself directly back into his house's dining room, he found it empty except for Sune crying in Emil's lap. Emil was the only one of the two to notice his presence:  
-I'm staying with him until Helena comes back. Could you…  
Emil was looking at the door. Daniel was hesitant to leave them alone, before remembering that if Emil did end up needing help, he would probably ask for it. He had to _actually_ do some of the work he had only been _pretending_ to do over the past few days anyway.

Emil sighed. That was a tough one. While "Janine" had chosen the headband without a second thought, Sune had tried every single option offered by Reynir to keep the talisman close to his face, and he couldn't stand keeping any of them on for more than a few minutes. Between the trembling hands with which he had put some of those accessories on himself and the sudden alertness that had come with the two that had required someone else's help, the reluctance was definitely involuntary, at least on a conscious level. Sune's teary reaction to the idea of never leaving the house again had been enough to tell Emil this wasn't an option he quite liked either. An idea suddenly crossed Emil's mind:  
-Sune, is it okay if I try something?  
-Go ahead…  
Emil took the small disk standing in for the future talisman on one of the earring options and lodged it in Sune's bad ear in such a way that some of the outer curves would keep it from falling out. A few moments later, Sune spoke again:  
-Are you done yet?

xxxx

Emil ended up being able to go to the market for most of the afternoon. Daniel had already promised that Anna would get a necklace alongside any Royals who turned out to not be immune. Before Emil had gone to his stall, Lalli has discreetly come close enough to Alicia to tell whether she would need a talisman or not. She turned out to need one, which meant Emil had a new task:  
-And how can I be sure that thing is _only_ going to protect me from that disease, and not going to corrupt me at the same time?  
Emil resigned himself to the fact that making Alicia wear this talisman was going to be harder than I thought it would be:  
-Daniel knows nothing about the disease. All he did is wish for you to have one of these. If it can reassure you, the guy who made this is entirely interested in women as far as I know.  
-But he still lives in the same house as you and your so-called husband. And Daniel, who could have very well added a few extra engravings after he made it. And you never said he _currently_ was seeing a woman.  
-The last girlfriend he had died in the palace fire a few years ago. He's allowed to take the time he wants to start a new relationship as far as I'm concerned.  
Another way to approach things crossed Emil's mind:  
-Please be honest with me: is there any way I can make you leave the market with this around your neck and convinced that it's nothing more than a preventative for a disease that could be re-emerging? Or am I losing my time?  
Alicia briefly adopted a pensive stance before answering:  
-There _is_ something you can bring me, and that would make me willing to run the risk of believing you in return.

-So, she's noticed that Dirk was often reading letter from you when she came to see him, but has been insisting that the contents were none of her business. She's convinced that the two of you are discussing some sort of dishonest plan and wants me to intercept one of your letters for Dirk and bring it to her. But I thought that if you wrote something now, carried it in your pocket for a while and gave it to me before leaving, it would look like I intercepted it.  
Emil didn't expect the pat on the shoulder and the "good thinking, you may work out after all" from Helena, who happened to be sitting on the side of him that wasn't occupied by Lalli. After they all made sure Markus actually approved of the idea, the rest of the conversation made Emil realize that what he had thought up as an easier alternative to intercepting the letter had an extra advantage: even if Markus simply made a copy of the next message he was planning to leave for Dirk anyway, this let him make sure that the letter contained as few things Alicia or her superiors could latch onto as proof of dishonest plans as possible. From previous dinner conversations, Emil knew that Markus' guard shifts overlapped with Dirk's break time, while Dirks' morning shift ended when Markus' started and the evening one started right around dinner time. This was the reason Dirk never came to the house, in addition to Alicia's departure from the orphanage in all but name meaning that he had to handle all four of his younger siblings by himself. The letters Alicia was so wary about were almost entirely the asking and giving of child-handling advice. Due to the fact that Alicia hardly spent any time with her younger siblings and the clashing points between the orphanage and the Daughters of Magda on child-rearing, Dirk had decided she was only entitled to sparse news about them. The other reason he avoided showing Alicia Markus' letters was that a poorly worded sentence risked giving her and her superiors exactly what they wanted.

xxxx

Of all possible reactions, Alicia had one that carefully crafting the letter had failed to account for:  
-You told her in advance, didn't you?  
Words came out of Emil's mouth before his brain could stop them and hope to craft some kind of cover:  
-I couldn't bring myself to go behind _his_ back, okay? And _he_ shows up for dinner almost every evening, so it was just much easier to do it that way.  
Alicia started to tear the letter apart, with a method that bore an eerie resemblance to the way Markus had changed the Daughters of Magda leaflet into a bunch of fine paper strips a few weeks earlier:  
-Do you even understand the _reason_ I told you to go behind _her_ back? A letter _she_ wrote knowing I would read it worthless. You can keep that suspicious necklace of yours! I should have known that trusting one of you people was a bad idea.  
Once again, Emil couldn't stay silent:  
-Well, I wasn't going to give you a letter written by Markus' hand without betraying _someone's_ trust in me. And you would have probably found signs of a plan in an intercepted letter no matter how innocuous the contents actually were.  
-I wouldn't…  
-Then why is that when I give you a letter written by his hand that spent the better part of a meal in his crumb-overflowing pocket, but completely devoid of what you were looking for, your first idea is that I told him?  
-I did make a mistake yesterday by not considering you could simply ask _her_ for a letter, but… wait, did you say something about a crumb-overflowing pocket?  
Alicia's face lit up as she asked the question. Emil decided it was a lead worth following:  
-Well, _he_ keeps snacks in there and hardly ever washes it, so crumbs come out each time _he_ pulls something out of it.  
The fact that some of the stickier crumbs had remained on the letter had actually been one of Emil's least favorite aspects of the plan. Alicia, meanwhile pumped her fists:  
-She _is_ still in there. You'd have no reason to lie while making a random complaint. Give me the necklace, knowing there's still hope for her is worth it. But I warn you. I'm going to be keeping track of any effect it has on me, and if it turns out it's not just protection, it's coming off.  
Emil silently gave her the necklace. The instructions _were_ to get her to wear it first and foremost. Any more words risked making her change her mind. He had yet to come up with things that Markus hadn't already tried anyway.

xxxx

-I wanted to tell this to the two of you yesterday evening, but the whole letter debacle made it a little hard to get just the two of you without getting too conspicuous about it.  
It went without saying that Daniel's level of functioning most mornings was the reason, he, Emil and Sune hadn't had that conversation in the morning. Emil hoped that Daniel would quickly get to whatever piece of information he wanted to tell them fast:  
-King Torbjörn is immune. Queen Siv isn't, she'll die if she gets sick. Sune's siblings are in the same case as him.  
Daniel gave them the time the needed to process the information, but had the look he had when he was expecting them to find the practical aspect of a piece of information regardless of their emotional response. Emil eventually figured it out:  
-If the fire hadn't happened and…  
Emil remembered Markus was only _supposed_ to be watching the final preparations for the play from the roof, and that talking about himself in the first person would blow his cover if "the rumor mill in person" was eavesdropping:  
-Prince Emil was still the heir, the Royal Family main branch would be made only of immune people. Now, all the potential heirs can get sick.  
Daniel simply nodded, now wearing what Emil had come to call his "I know it's bad situation, but we need to bear with it to not ruin our chances of fixing it later" face. At least, between that information and what Daniel had found in the orphanage, the picture of what "Tobias" was planning was taking shape.

xxxx

Markus had gone through most books in the set of stories from which the orphanage plays were adapted over the past few days. His suspicion that it was something worth doing had only gotten confirmed when Helena has asked to borrow one of his books. There was mention of a recurring drum-player in some of them, but the plays from the last three evenings had included her in events from which she was originally absent. Dirk's ten-year-old younger sister had actually played her on the previous evening, on which Markus had written a second letter for Alicia. According to the letter Markus had found upon returning to his dorm room an hour ago, Dirk's younger sister had noticed members of the audience covering their ears or leaving their seat during her scenes and now wondered if she had made any kind of mistake despite having been chosen for the role in part due to her musical talent. Markus was currently gauging whether it would be wise of him to mention Helena, Sune, Janine and Runa's reaction to the music played by the drum-player's incarnation from a couple evenings ago or not. Markus had figured out long ago that for every ten orphans getting the best life they could hope for given their circumstances, one was probably being used as a magic experimentation subject by Vivian. However, during Markus' childhood, there had been a handful of generalized "medical exams" that had occurred only once, and that he could only explain by Vivian having very briefly needed a much larger sample of experimentation subjects. As the rumors about Vivian's permanent experimentation subjects made for an obvious possible punishment for refusing to take part in those suspicious exams, older children tended to cooperate as a precaution and encourage the younger ones to do the same without asking too many questions. But even those had only involved orphanage residents. A couple days from now, when the Royals were going to come to watch the plays performed by sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds. Was the drum-player still going to use the same beat?

xxxx

Håkan was happy to wake up from _that_ strange nightmare. This was the third night in a row that he moved so much in his sleep that his sleeping robe and the pieces of protective jewelry he was supposed to keep on at all times found themselves scattered in various place of his bed. Fortunately, he had once again woken up early enough to get his hands on each of these items and have them back on by the time his morning attendants came in.

Preparations for the morning meal took a lot longer than usual, yet Håkan's attendants didn't seem in a particular hurry. When he was finally escorted to the dining room, Anna came out of her bedroom with her own bodyguards at the same time he did, which could only mean her own preparations had been delayed, as well. Once again, it took both of them a few moments to remember that nobody was going to come out of the third bedroom.

As Håkan and Anna were being escorted to the dining room, a guard stormed out a room just as the frontmost part of their now-shared escort was about to walk by it:  
-I don't care if you don't believe me! I know what I saw! And I'm going to look for that thing myself if I have… oh, your highnesses.  
The guard took a few moments to realize she was in their way and step aside. Håkan briefly wondered what the "thing" she wanted to look for was, but by now knew that threats were never as impressive as the guards made them sound when first mentioning them. He briefly looked back at the guard, and realized he recognized her face. It had taken him a while to realize this because the woman was part of one of those pairs of people one hardly ever saw apart, and the other half of the pair was nowhere to be seen. Too bad, the absent half of the pair was the interesting one. Her sword's pommel was decorated with a heart-shaped pendant that Håkan liked; unfortunately, its simplicity would have made it clash with the rest of Håkan's attire more that the two pieces of protective jewelry he had been recently given already did. Coincidental timing in the movements of two of the rear guards made Håkan notice a familiar pendant in the guard's hand. There was a dark stain on it. Håkan suddenly remembered seeing an item extremely similar to that pendant in his dream from the previous night. As he was trying to remember the rest of the dream, he thought he heard someone playing a few beats on a drum. Trying to remember the rest of the dream was starting to give him a headache, and he could no longer remember any kind of detail about the heart-shaped item anymore.


	11. Chrysalis

**Chrysalis**

There was a chrysalis on one of the poles of Emil's stall. Lalli could tell it could emerge at any moment, and he didn't have anything better to do but watch it while crouching on the stall's counter after having renewed one of the protection spells that had been cast on it; Emil had taken advantage of the fact that he could watch the stall to give a "quick look" at other stalls that tended to open and close at times that kept him from visiting them. While transfixed by the chrysalis, he vaguely sensed someone approach the stall:  
-Stig isn't here right now, but I can sell you tea if you know what you want and don't try to haggle.  
-Uh… I work at the stall right next to this one, actually. I just had some things to put on the counter first.  
If Lalli remembered what the others had said correctly, the two stalls on either side of Emil's were trying to recruit people into religious orders. Neither tended to give out more than a handful of leaflets a day according to him, so Lalli got curious as to what else either of them would need to bring. He gave the Daughters of Magda stall a brief glance to see the orange-haired girl from Magda day and a box like the ones used in fruits stalls with a large quantity of cookies inside. Lalli remembered someone mentioning they sometimes sold some to raise money. Too bad they would be using that money to tell people that Emil, himself and a few other people he didn't find too annoying had some sort of disease that needed to be cured. The cookies really looked good. Hulda's sweets had been good as well, but he was never going to eat them again after what she had done. Emil chose that moment to come back, bearing a couple of large cookies:  
-Someone at one of the other stalls told me the Daughters and Sisters were both selling cookies today. I thought we might have some now so we don't get tempted later.  
Lalli gladly accepted the cookie, but couldn't help correcting one little fact in Emil's otherwise quite good reasoning:  
-You mean so _you_ don't get tempted later. I'm going home as soon as you're back behind your counter.  
Emil replied with a tone that usually meant "you just gave me free reign":  
-Hey, who's the one who ate a third of my starting stock when I gave pastry selling a try? And knowing you, you're not going anywhere before that butterfly comes out.  
The orange-haired teenage girl – Lalli remembered her name was Alicia – spoke:  
-What butterfly?  
Lalli pointed at the chrysalis before taking a bit out of the cookie:  
-Right here. It's going to come out soon.  
The butterfly chose that moment to start coming out of its chrysalis, and soon spread its wings as much as it could to help them dry. A voice came from the Sisters' stall:  
-Oh, hi there. We haven't seen each other since Magda day, haven't we?  
Lalli paid attention to the voice's direction to recognize Emil's cousin Anna, whom he was supposed to pretend was different girl named Annika. He _actually_ hadn't seen either since Magda day, so that was easy. He noticed she had brought a box of cookies, as well.  
-Hi… You're Annika, right?  
Anna nodded:  
-Indeed. I'm afraid I didn't catch your name last time.  
-It's Lalli.  
Just as Lalli was finishing his sentence, a woman wearing a Daughter of Magda outfit, whom he was quite certain hadn't been among the Magda day group, put an extra box on the Daughter stall's counter:  
-Alicia, what are you doing? Nobody is going to buy anything until you're behind the counter.  
Lalli quickly realized that the second box's contents weren't cookies, but a bunch of round talismans. His mage sight didn't enable him to do much more than tell if talismans actually did something or not when it came to this country's magic. However, the spell inscribed upon them looked a lot like part of the one on the necklace Emil had been tasked to give to Alicia. While it could merely be a coincidence, Lalli remembered the others discussing the risks that came with giving Alicia one of the necklaces, and someone pointing out that nothing would really keep her from showing it to the mage among the Daughters of Magda. Someone else had commented that it actually might not be a bad thing and result in some of their followers getting talismans that actually worked that they otherwise wouldn't have. The new woman clapped her hands to get attention:  
-Many of you have probably already seen the information board this morning. And the claims according to which only half of the population is going to need the protective talismans being distributed because they are immune to the disease. That last part is a lie. Many of those who have been told they were immune by a medical mage just so happen to be problematic to the Royals and other well-placed people. Fortunately, I, as the sole mage among the Mora Daughters of Magda, have managed to get my hands on one of their protective talismans. I have use it to make some with only the disease protection spell, and without all the other things the mages working for the Royals and nobility have snuck into them. Please make a line to come and get them.  
As people were getting their talismans, Lalli realized something wasn't right. The talisman Alicia had been given was one among a handful to which other spells besides the protection from the monster disease had been added, all destined to people whom the person pretending to be Vivian had a high chance of trying to hurt or take hostage in the near future. The household had otherwise produced only talismans made to protect people from the monster disease and nothing else; talismans took more time to make when there were more spells on them, so a choice had had to be made between how many people would get a necklace how many different things each person would get protected from. The talisman that was being distributed out of the Daughter's stall had everything from Alicia's talisman on it, _except_ the complex spell meant to protect from the monster disease. Someone who actually knew that country's magic well had to come here.

xxxx

Just as he was bidding farewell the man selling glass-preserved insects who was walking away with the butterfly in a small cage in one hand and a pot of one of his more expensive teas in the other, Emil realized Daughters of Magda mage's face was familiar to him; he had missed it so far because her light brown hair a grown _a lot_ since he had last seen her. As he was digging through his memories in hope of putting a name on the woman, he heard it from a voice he didn't expect:  
-Katarina?  
Helena had told him plenty of times that the market was one of the last places she felt comfortable going; she had never absolutely needed to so far thanks to plenty of members of the household both being at a lower risk of facing hostility and having a good idea of what she liked. Yet there she was, right in front of Emil's counter, in an outfit that was better-looking than the clothes she usually bothered to put on.  
-What are you doing here?  
-Lalli said a Scandi mage really needed have a look at the talismans the Daughters were giving away. Knowing him, I guessed there was a decent chance he hadn't told you anything about that before going home.  
Emil took a few moments to process the information before answering:  
-Sounds like him. But couldn't have Reynir come instead?  
-Unless the two of you have suddenly become able to speak to each other, it would have been a dumb idea. About as dumb as showing the Daughters and a bunch of their followers the face of the guy who taught Daniel and I to make a certain spell.  
-Ah, I see what you mean. So, where do you know that Katarina woman from?  
-She was the last person Niels started sponsoring before he died. Going directly from the Southern Region to the Isle would have gotten her laughed at, so she was supposed to spend some time in Mora to catch up first. I didn't expect her to still be in town. Though I'm not _entirely_ surprised by her line of work. People who are naturally good at the magic used in medical examinations but don't get proper training frequently mistake things that are merely unusual for dysfunctions that need to be fixed. And… she apparently can't even tell which part of the spell is meant to protect people from the new disease. I'm going to need to have a talk with her whenever she has a break. Please keep an eye on what's going on.  
Helena then brought a cookie from the Sisters of Magda as to not seemingly leave the market empty-handed. The woman named Katarina was relieved by Alicia's usual supervisor right around the time most people working at the market who weren't selling ready-to-eat food usually had lunch.

As soon as the two of them were sitting face to face at a small table in a noisy eatery and they had ordered their food, Katarina showed Helena the necklace she was wearing under her dress: it had the part of the spell that actually protected from the disease, while the one she wore outside was identical to the one being distributed.  
-I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I know the part I omitted from those necklaces is the one doing the actual disease protection. I told Alicia that I couldn't know of all of its effects unless she wore it for a few days, then let me examine her. I'm sure you're wondering whether you should tell people that the talisman that is being handed out doesn't work on the disease or not.  
There had been many factors in Helena's silence upon realizing Lalli had been right, one of them being the likeliness of the people lining up to get the talismans actually believing her, especially if they recognized her. Katarina continued as she put her collar back in place:  
-Considering your circumstances, I'm guessing you'd rather live in a town without a Daughters of Magda chapter than one with one. If you can spend just a couple days or so playing dumb and telling anyone you feel you _have_ to share that information with to do the same, the local Daughters of Magda will get their comeuppance. My plan already includes making sure Alicia comes out of it alive. She may end up just shaken enough to turn to her orphanage family for comfort, and realize she's been treating her older brothers unfairly all this time. You'd be doing both of them a favor you definitely owe them.  
Helena saw a few holes in her reasoning, but also realized than some of the other possible outcomes could be what Katarina was _actually_ aiming for. In the latter case, it would be best to not spell out the fact she was aware of them. In addition, she had a more relevant question to ask:  
-Are you doing this on your own?  
-Tobias had other jobs besides being his assistant to offer. And even though he's no longer here, someone who can very obviously afford it is still paying me and telling me to carry it out to the end. Just an extra reason for you to not interfere if something I'm unaware of is still making you consider it.  
If there had only been Katarina's new benefactor whose identity she could easily guess, Helena would have taken her statement to only actually mean that she should be cautious if she decided to interfere. However, Helena now couldn't be sure there weren't other people with missions similar to Katarina's out there. If that was the case, she had only discovered part of a bigger picture, and the effects of interfering with whatever Katarina was cooking up could change tremendously depending on what preparations were going on elsewhere. A quick shift through "Tobias'" past boasts turned up nothing than seemed immediately relevant. She next focused on the fact that the member of the True Rulers who was playing advocate for the Daughters of Magda should be made aware of this, if only "accidentally". Daniel couldn't be that person for obvious reasons, but _someone_ had to be. As much as many people wanted the Daughters of Magda and similar groups to completely disappear, their apparent disappearance would only really mean that they had gone underground. If a group such as the Daughters of Magda went underground, it just made it easier for the average citizen to act as if it didn't actually exist. As long as they were kept just above the surface, denial of their existence was harder. While it also made it easier for them to recruit new members or harm their targets, the presence of a stall held by the real deal at the town's largest market let potential targets know what to watch out for instead of making their own, possibly wrong, assumptions on the subject. And should they actually strike in some way, it was easier for people who considered themselves part of neither group to believe it had happened, and possibly realize that their sympathy leaned more towards one group than the other after all. The Daughters however needed some straw to grasp at to stay above the surface, and one of them was to have a few high-placed nobles, including a councilor, at the very least pretend to be on their side. After a quick thought, Kenneth, Rolf and Harald became the only possible advocates. Kenneth's past fling with Randi didn't exclude him, as many people still believed people who liked their own sex could be "cured" by a satisfying relationship with someone of the other sex, and they had a strong overlap with those who thought there was no such thing as being interested in more than one sex at a given time. The possibility of it being Rolf was an unfortunate holdover from a time during which a lot of what the Daughters of Magda fought against was genuinely believed to be "unnatural" by most of the population. Something Harald himself had once told Helena summed up the reason it could be him: "if every single trade with the main purpose of parting fools from their money ended, the country's economy would collapse". Selling close-minded people low-effort "solutions" for situations that were only problems in their own minds was as much a market as any other. The money councilor position _definitely_ wasn't made for Emil. Helena suddenly grasped the full implications of the timeframe Katarina had given her, and that notifying all three of the councilors to whom the information might be relevant would probably be faster than trying to figure out which would actually have the most use for it. The first step was to hopefully trick Katarina into thinking she had heeded her warning and had no intention of interfering in whatever she was doing. That, unfortunately, meant helping her keep her cover for now:  
-I see what you mean. Now, can you please explain me why I should hand my daughter over to the Daughters of Magda for her own good?  
That conversation was the one that was underway when the waitress brought them their food.

xxxx

To give even more credence to the cover-up conversation with Katarina, Helena had spent some time sipping on a tea sample while sitting against the back pole of Emil's stall and using him as a sounding board about the conversation's topic before heading back home. Now, it was time to put her actual plans in place. The location of Rolf's house meant he was the easiest to warn. Fortunately, Sune had been three quarters into a not-too-thick book he had borrowed from Runa when Helena had come into the dining room. He was now reading through is as fast as he could so he could return it to Runa without making the fact he was retuning it earlier than planned too obvious. The future "forgotten bookmark" with the message for Rolf was already in place. Right now, Helena was trying to get her mind off just how little time ago she could have gotten information to Harald via the black-market King and focus on what she was going to tell the Coordinator during the night. Next would be an excuse for Daniel to give Kenneth a quick visit.

xxxx

Kenneth let out a sigh of relief:  
-Thank you for this. I accepted to be that child's "real" father in part to test the waters concerning them. I noticed at least a couple cared more about the sex of the people involved in a couple than about their marital status, and wanted to see how many there actually were. There turned out to be fewer than I had hoped. A prior warning about a possible attack on them should get me back in a few good graces. Now, you should probably leave before anyone realizes you're here.  
Not having found any reason to visit Kenneth that wouldn't have to be a secret anyway, Daniel had settled for a "drop-in, drop-out" visit. Just after taking his "ghostly" leave, Daniel felt something grab his arm, in the exact place "Tobias" had back when Daniel had only been able to tell that they were someone other than Vivian masquerading as her. A familiar voice spoke to him from behind as he realized he was effectively paralyzed:  
-All you and your friends had to do was to allow the death of a bunch of people who would do a lot of harm to your household if they could get away with it die. You would have been rid of them without having to do anything. You would have been able to console your little sister as she was mourning the death of her colleagues. Maybe she would have realized that there are more important things than whether the comforting hand on her shoulder belongs to a sister or a brother. Too bad, you missed your chance. You won't be getting another one for a while, now.

That evening, Daniel's household and Markus searched the entire town, both physically and magically, instead of watching the orphanage plays. When the search turned up nothing, Helena asked for everyone, except Sune and "Janine", to assemble in the dining room. At more or less the same time, she, Markus, Emil, Lalli, Reynir, Sigrun and Mikkel all produced identical cards with identical hand-written instructions, except for Reynir's that were in the Shared Tongue because he didn't speak Scandi. Multiple backups, alongside a guarantee that nobody was showing a falsified card. Daniel had prepared for the prospect of going missing well.

xxxx

The market of the dead Coordinator spoke before Helena could:  
-Please tell me that Daniel is actually safe at home, or at the very least that you, Markus or someone else who can be trusted has gotten hold of him.  
-Such a lie wouldn't be worth the price I would charge. By the way, take those. If you launch the search entirely on your own funds, you'll be giving your identity away more than you need to. People who figured out who I am will be much less surprised at me dumping all my savings on this. I have a lead for whoever gets sent out: I just found today that out our common foe may be planning something against the Mora Daughters of Magda very soon, and the person who told me this hinted that it may be part of a bigger plan. Kenneth was apparently the last person to see Daniel. It was stealth visit and he's quite sure he saw him leave the same way he came.  
Helena spent the rest of the market of the dead's opening hours hanging around the Coordinator's stand, in case any news came. Some people who knew something would possibly want to avoid giving the information to her directly. It would be easier for those people to avoid her on the way to their preferred information broker if she stayed in a spot with a well-known location for the entire duration of the market. As the time until close became so little that it was too late even for last-minute transactions, Helena had one last question to ask the Coordinator:  
-How's your health doing since last time I asked?  
-Nothing new. Doing anything that requires moving at all will be up to you kids and whoever gets paid to do it in the underground.  
Faking one's death only guaranteed that _the death_ was faked. It didn't make one immune to the injuries and health problems that would have been found in an honest-to-gods survivor of the means by which the apparent death had occurred.

xxxx

Emil still had to go to his stall that morning, as there were many reasons to keep more people than necessary from knowing of Daniel's disappearance. People wouldn't just assume Emil was sick if he didn't show up; to make that believable, a member of the household would need to show up to inform the Planner and the keepers of the stalls neighboring his. The lie would then risk snowballing into someone actually visiting the mansion and disrupting a set of ongoing tasks that were all some combination of best kept secret and time-sensitive. Some of those tasks were another reason both Helena and Mikkel had agreed that Emil should be out of the house; having figured out that something could happen while the Royals came to see the last plays all on his own, Markus had already asked to be on the evening guard shift and hence was currently free to use his time as he pleased during his usual work hours. With Markus hanging around the house, not being inside it was the best way for Emil to keep him from realizing that he'd watched those plays from the Royal seats before and was more worried about something happening to the Royals than about Daniel missing. And if Markus wanted to get any sort of inside info about the Royal seats, Helena and Sune were the ones he'd ask anyway.

Unfortunately, Emil's "day started badly and having to be next to the two of you isn't making it any better" excuse for his obvious bad mood apparently managed to fool Alicia a little too well, as she decided to use him for what he had come to call "preaching practice" yet again. He felt like giving the lowest grade ever to the current iteration of her speech, as it a little too blatantly boiled down to "you'd have much fewer bad days because we wouldn't be harassing you anymore and literally any woman would be ten times better than Lalli as a spouse". Just a little more than a year of marriage and three of really knowing Lalli told Emil that the kind of person most people considered "ideal spouses" would have been quite unlikely to work out for him. During a lull in customer flow, Emil found himself focusing on scraping the now-empty chrysalis off his stall's pole to keep himself from blurting out information he had been expressly asked to not share with Alicia just to have her calm down a little; considering the timeline that Katarina woman had given to Helena, anything that could get in the way Alicia being around Katarina when she needed to be could make the difference between life and death for her. Of all things, the chrysalis-scraping ended up being the thing to make Alicia change the subject:  
-The butterfly that came out of there turned out to be kind of ugly, didn't it? Too bad it wasn't a prettier kind.  
-The guy selling the glass-preserved butterflies seemed to like it alright.  
-Well, good thing he got it for free, he's probably going to have a lot of trouble selling it.  
Emil was suddenly tempted to go see if the butterfly was ready yet and buy it just to spite her. Unfortunately, he had seen the price of those things, and they were quite expensive. He would be able to afford it only if it actually _did_ get marked down due to not selling for too long. Another thing that could happen crossed his mind, and made for a perfect answer to Alicia:  
-What are you talking about? I'm quite sure it will sell as soon as it hits the stall.  
-You have that horrible taste in butterflies, yet you insist nothing is wrong with you?  
-Why would I be one with horrible taste in butterflies and not you?  
Emil sighed in relief, as being able to organically ask Alicia how sure she was to be the one who was right on a subject that relied on personal taste usually granted him peace at least until the rest of the day. The brand of propaganda the Daughters used wasn't quite fit for topics as irrelevant to society's workings as which butterflies looked the nicest. Two welcome voices piped up from the Sisters' side:  
-Were the two of you talking about the butterfly from yesterday? It was gorgeous! Annika said she liked it, too.  
-She almost made me wish I was there.  
Only Anna's supervisor and the younger volunteer who sometimes came instead of Anna were currently manning the Sisters' stall. Emil could easily guess the reason for which Anna herself was absent.

Daniel knew he had lost consciousness at some point because he was slowly regaining it. While he couldn't tell whether his eyes were closed or his surroundings were actually dark, he could hear voices that were clearly human. Senses only mages possessed told him that he definitely wasn't in the physical world. Daniel decided to focus on what he was hearing as much as possible. By sheer coincidence, the first few sentences he was able to properly parse were exactly what he needed to hear to guess the nature of his new location:  
-We are going to see the "Markus, Royal Spy" plays performed by Vivian's orphans tonight. Do you remember those? The healer said it may help you a little to watch them.  
Daniel had studied "Janine" as much as he could. "Tobias" had made it extremely hard to reverse any of their actions without a high risk of destroying Vivian's mind and/or seemingly killing the child. And now, he had sent Daniel straight to an artificial body that he had much fewer qualms about damaging for the sake of figuring out how it worked. He had no idea how much time there was left before the plays started, but the time "Janine" had taken to wake up, and later be responsive after that initial transfer made the chances of it being late in the day rather than still early quite high. However, if he was luck and enough as his guesses turned out to be right, watching a familiar play may very well gain the reputation of a miracle cure.

As soon as Emil came back to the mansion, Sigrun grabbed him and handed him over to Mikkel, who brought him to the kitchen and asked him to make some medicinal tea. This turned out to have been done to allow Mikkel to share news in a fairly quiet place. There apparently hadn't been any sort of progress in actually finding Daniel since Emil had left in the morning. The instructions from the card, meanwhile, had been followed. A few extra people had been put in the loop, partly to help in the efforts, partly so they could prepare for the eventuality of Daniel's well-being being used as leverage towards them. The young woman who had portrayed Daniel in the Magda day play had come to the house with the costume's wig in a bag, and was now lying sideways in his bed and wearing his actual sleep clothes, back to the window open to let some air in; as far as the guards currently on the orphanage's roof were concerned, Daniel was simply too ill to leave his bed. Markus, meanwhile, was taking advantage of the fact that he was exceptionally doing an evening shift to keep him company during the day. Having Emil bring up tea soon after he came back from the market was a contribution to the cover.

When Emil brought the tray up, Markus and his acquaintance seemed to still be talking, despite the fact that she had allegedly arrived not that long after he had left. On the other hand, Daniel and Markus _had_ gone to meet with some of the latter's acquaintances after the Magda day plays, so it stood to reason that he was actually friends with at least one member of the troupe. He came in with a tray:  
-Hi. Mikkel told me the two of you could use some tea and snacks.  
Markus introduced his friend, all while looking like he was simply showing him a good place to put the tray:  
-Julia, this is Stig. He sells his tea at the market for most of the day, so she had to leave before you came. Stig, Julia from the troupe we watched on Magda day. She was given the vacant spot in the orphanage room about a couple years after Daniel first moved here, so we've been keeping in touch.  
-If by "keeping in touch", you mean spending time with me only when he cancels plans or mysteriously disappears, that sounds about right.  
Julia's tone made it hard to tell whether the comment was being lighthearted or not, causing Emil to raise an eyebrow as he put the tray down on the nightstand. Markus explained looking a little embarrassed:  
-Well, she's not exactly wrong. Daniel cancelled quite often while he and Helena were seeing each other, and at the time I was trying not to rely on him alone to have a relaxing time. But I did still kind of end up spending time with other people only when he couldn't come. And that _did_ include Julia and I not really becoming regular drinking buddies until after Daniel went missing on the Isle.

xxxx

Emil hadn't had the heart to wake Lalli up after all the energy he had spent on the search, especially considering he may or may not need to do it all over again after dinner. Emil had ended up having a nap that he had turned out to really need instead. By the time he woke up from it, it was definitely time to take Markus and Julia's tray downstairs. As he came close to Daniel's room, its occupants were talking:  
-If you have any interest in my opinion, it sounds like to me that you and Daniel should let go of Alicia already. If she can't stand you doing what feels right for you, it's her problem, not yours.  
Markus sighed:  
-I'd be lying if I told you I never considered it. But each time I've gone anywhere near making a concrete move in that direction, I just… couldn't. And to be honest, it's partly because of you. You were so heartbroken when your parents gave you that ultimatum to return to your home promptly or never. Doing that to her…  
-Pff. Talk about some "school" managed by the Daughters in a town where they're doing a little better than here was the reason I left in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, the reason you'd have to burn bridges with Alicia are much more understandable than the reason my parents had to do the same with me.  
-It's not only that. Judging by what your family did during the following days, they very obviously weren't expecting you to not return to your home at the time. If I end up giving her a similar ultimatum, I don't want to be using it as a panic-induced last-ditch attempt to make her change her mind. I want to be doing it while genuinely ready to hear both answers. And for the one I won't like to be final. That's the part I know I'm not ready for quite yet.  
Emil decided to wait a while before coming to get the tray.

xxxx

Those who could turn into a monster had died looking on the outside how they had come to be on the inside. For the rest, it hadn't mattered whether they were able to be sick or not; they had died at the… appendages of those who had transformed before they could understand what was happening. As she was washing the blood off Alicia, Katarina was amazed at how perfectly she had regained a human form. Even the places where skin had broken had become mere rashes, which were fading so fast that they might as well have been dirt being washed away by the damp cloth:  
-This is great. According to what I read, the first victims of this disease would completely lose their minds, stay in that form forever, and could only die by starving, getting killed, or have their form become even more twisted to the point that disease's inherent magic couldn't sustain it. On the way for a cure, someone figured out how to reverse the transformation.  
Alicia was conscious, but hadn't said a single word ever since Katarina had taken control of her transformed body to kill the other monsters and make sure there weren't any survivors besides the two of them. Katarina tied a talisman around Alicia's neck and spoke to her:  
-Now, you must not take this off until I tell you to. There is special music that can make you transform without me being able to stop it, and it will be playing where I'll be taking you next. Keeping the necklace on will keep you from transforming when you hear the music. It will be very important for people to see you _not_ transform down there. It's going to be your alibi.  
She dressed Alicia, making sure to not accidentally do anything that would activate the extra protection spells that Daniel had probably added himself. She briefly considered swapping her own "disease protection only" only talisman with Alicia's "full set of spells" one, but part of what she wanted to accomplish was making Alicia realize that the talisman sent to her by Daniel was genuinely protecting her, and didn't have any sort of trap in it. If she came to the conclusion that Daniel had known Katarina would need it and was actually an accomplice to the massacre, it wouldn't be Katarina's fault, at least not entirely. A big part of it would be simply due to the kind of reasoning the Daughters had taught Alicia to have. With Alicia dressed, Katarina checked the hearth to make sure the message from Kenneth she had managed to intercept during the previous evening was completely destroyed and headed for the orphanage.

As she left the building with Alicia's hand in hers, Katarina magically scanned her once again, and sighed in frustration. Once again, she had to remind herself that if Alicia had been a mage, Daniel would have discovered it years ago. Katarina herself had went through a phase of having the exact right combination of magical inclination and lack of training to mistake the people the Daughters wished to "cure" for having something inherently wrong with them. After having heard of the reasons Alicia had joined the Daughters, Katarina had suspected that she was in a situation similar to her past one. It had turned out to not be the case. Katarina's current prime suspect for Alicia's stance in regards to her brother was a compromise the orphanage had made decades ago as to not be bothered on Magda day: thanks to a bunch of women who had no concept of cases like Markus' naturally existing since birth, he'd mostly had to figure out who he really was "on his own, without any external influence". Katarina knew of it mostly from hearing some Daughters ranting about the arrangement currently being respected to the letter, but outright ignored in spirit. As far as Katarina could tell, the latter consisted mostly of letting older children who had been taken in after being kicked out of prejudiced families interact with younger children. Alicia's own main scapegoat was the yearly plays, where there was little regard for whether the actor's gender and the character's gender matched. In spite of the complaints, the arrangement remained more in favor of the Daughter's worldview than they, themselves, realized; it had been a big factor in Markus having had to be someone he wasn't for long enough that Alicia got deeply attached to that person. Katarina couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if Alicia had been aware she had a second older brother from the start.


End file.
